One woman dies every two minutes in pregnancy or childbirth: UN

A United Nations report reported that in 2020, 287,000 women died during pregnancy or childbirth.

According to the United Nations (UN), a woman dies every two minutes in the world during childbirth or from complications related to pregnancy, although maternal mortality has been reduced by a third in the last two decades.

The report Trends in maternal mortality reveals that 287,000 women died during pregnancy or childbirth in 2020, that is, every two minutes.

In 2000, there were 446 thousand. This is a slight decrease compared to the 309,000 deaths registered in 2016, when the UN Sustainable Development Goals came into force.

Through a statement, the director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, regretted that pregnancy continues to be an extremely dangerous experience for millions of people in the world who do not have access to respectful and good quality health services.

Although the report highlights the progress made in reducing the number of deaths between 2000 and 2015, it warns that since then, achievements have stalled.

In some cases they have even gone backwards. Globally, the maternal mortality rate fell by 34.3% between 2000 and 2020. This rate represents the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births.

In this period, the country that registered the greatest decrease (-95.5%) was Belarus, with one maternal death for every 100,000 births in 2020 against 24 in 2000. On the contrary, Venezuela added 259 maternal deaths for every 100,000 births in 2020 against 92 in 2000, an increase of 182.8% in the maternal mortality rate.

Tedros pointed out that the statistics show the urgent need to guarantee for every woman and every girl “access to essential health services before, during and after childbirth and the possibility of fully exercising their reproductive rights”.

The number of deaths has increased or stagnated in almost all regions of the world in recent years, with the exception of Australia, New Zealand and Central and South Asia.

In two of the eight United Nations regions (Europe-North America and Latin America-Caribbean) the maternal mortality rate even increased between 2016 and 2020, by 17% and 15%, respectively.

The main causes of these deaths are acute bleeding, high blood pressure, pregnancy-related infections, complications from abortions performed in unsafe settings, and underlying conditions that can worsen with pregnancy (such as HIV-AIDS and malaria). 

TYT Newsroom