High Maternal Mortality in the US

The following is a speech I gave at a Stop Violence Against Women rally organized by the Answer Coalition.

                        

Amnesty International says the following, “It’s more dangerous to give birth in the United States than in 49 other countries.” In 2010 The UN placed the US as 50^th in the world for maternal mortality. The risk to African American women is four times greater than it is for Caucasian women.

The rates of maternal deaths in the US have risen dramatically since 1987. This is strange considering that the US spends more money on maternal health than any other hospital care. And yet women die at higher rates than they do in Kuwait, Bulgaria and South Korea.

Half of maternal deaths in the US are preventable. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “every human being has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself (herself) and his (her) family, including medical care and necessary social services.” Ideally this would mean that the US should provide quality health services regardless of income, race or color. We all know this is not the case, because the health care system is engineered by profit. The reality of the situation is that women come across shortages of providers, facilities, bureaucratic problems, language barriers, cultural barriers, lack of health insurance for those who are poor, to name a few. The government has turned a blind eye to making sure that all women receive access to quality health care, including reproductive health services. This is a grave injustice.

For more than 20 years the government has failed to improve maternal health care. The Maternal Health Accountability Act of 2011 failed. It did not have enough support. Surely, if this were some type of legislation involving more weapons it would have passed. Or if all the pregnant women and their infants had filler the coffers of their representatives it would have passed.

All pregnant women and their infants, regardless of their income, color and social standing are entitled to quality maternal health care, because this is a basic human right. It is not a right reserved for the few or for pampered royals.

This is a statement from a 2011 editorial in the Contraception Journal, “It is a human tragedy when a woman dies giving birth; her death forever changes her community and family for all future generations. It is both a tragedy and a human rights failure when a woman dies needlessly of preventable causes in a country that lacks the political will to have prevented her death.”

Sources: Amnesty International and website of the Contraception Journal