Why Are Some Settings Resource-Poor and Others Not? the Global Marketplace, Perfect Economic Storms, And the Right to Health (Commentary) (Report‪)‬

If a well-understood process every day caused four or five airliners to crash, the situation would be regarded as a humanitarian emergency. It would dominate the headlines, especially if ways of avoiding the crashes were well known and widely practised in some parts of the world. Now consider complications of pregnancy and childbirth, which kill 358,000 women per year, overwhelmingly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In Canada, a woman's lifetime risk of dying from complications of pregnancy or childbirth is 1 in 5,600; in sub-Saharan Africa, the world's poorest region, it is 1 in 31. (1) According to one estimate, "for every woman who dies, an estimated 30 women live to suffer severe morbidities including infertility, fistula, and incontinence." (2) (p. 132) Interventions that would drastically reduce this carnage are demonstrably effective, cost relatively little, and are taken for granted where most readers of this article live. (3)