BLOG: A Real Human Rights Emergency

A human rights emergency often describes crises such as killings of civilians in Darfur, the Rwandan genocide or perhaps even the recent floods in Pakistan. Rarely would one consider a woman's pregnancy to fall into this category.

But when we consider the fact that more than half a million women die in childbirth or related causes every year, it's clear that the situation has reached catastrophic levels.

In some countries, women routinely run the gauntlet of death when they become pregnant. For example, in Sierra Leone figures show that one in eight women risks dying in childbirth, while in Indonesia every year approximately 20,000 women die during pregnancy and childbirth.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy here is that 99 per cent of these deaths can be prevented.

Regularly, discrimination and inequality are the fundamental causes of women's inability to access the services they need. A recent Amnesty report highlighted that, although health care to pregnant women in Burkina Faso is free at the point of delivery for the poorest women, many hospital staff do not pass on this information to their patients, forcing hundreds of women who are entitled to free care to pay for the cost of delivering their baby. Consequently families are either left further crippled by poverty because of the cost, or they elect to not go to hospital for the birth – massively increasing the chances of complications.

Frequently in Peru Indigenous women are left isolated and ill-informed about their options during pregnancy, exacerbating their chances of not surviving.

The right to decent health care is just as much a fundamental human right as is the right not to be tortured. But it is often a struggle to get this issue on the political agenda.

Next week, world leaders will have no choice but to address this matter as they meet at the UN General Assembly to review the progress of the eight Millennium Development Goals – one of which is the aim to reduce deaths of pregnant women around the world.

Of all the Goals, this is the one which is furthest behind. Is that emblematic of the level of global political will there has been regarding the plight of pregnant women?

Pregnancy should not be a death sentence. Yet for far too many women it is. At the Review Summit, world leaders can – and must – pledge to set out concrete steps to reduce the number of maternal deaths in their countries. Chatter and debate alone is futile.

When I – along with representatives from other organisations – met with David Cameron and Nick Clegg earlier this year, both leaders assured us that they support the need to step up global commitments on reducing maternal mortality.

As one doctor put it, “women are not dying of diseases we cannot treat… they are dying because societies have yet to make the decision that their lives are worth saving”.
This September, let's make sure that world leaders do make the decision that the lives of all pregnant women are worth saving.

Kate Allen is Amnesty International UK Director.