Keeping the Pressure on to Invest in Women's Health

• by Matthew O. Berger (washington)
• Wednesday, June 09, 2010
• Inter Press Service

That was the main message coming out of this year's Women Deliver conference here, which wrapped up Wednesday afternoon. The conference sought to generate commitment and investment toward reaching the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goal number five — to reduce the number of women dying in childbirth and achieve universal access to prenatal care and family planning services.

Those goals are supposed to be met by 2015, and though progress has been made, Women Deliver, the global advocacy group organising the conference, would like to keep the pressure on governments and funders.

They got the big names - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, first ladies, parliamentarians, celebrities - and the big crowds, an estimated 3,500 delegates.

And they got some of the commitments they sought. On the conference's first day, Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Gates Foundation, announced a five-year, 1.5 billion-dollar investment by her foundation in maternal and child health, family planning and nutrition.

Also on Monday, Ban announced that support is building for a 'Joint Action Plan' that would seek to accelerate progress toward MDG 5 and would ensure investments toward that goal have their intended impact.

The conference was thought to have been the largest ever on maternal health issues and aside from the dignitaries, the diverse crowd was filled with doctors, midwives and plenty of mothers who knew the thrills and fears of childbirth firsthand.

The conference's slogan was 'Invest in Women — It Pays'. Ultimately, the investment they are hoping for is an additional 12 billion U.S. dollars in 2010, increasing to an additional 20 billion dollars by 2015. This is what they say it will cost to meet MDG 5 by its deadline.

The return on that potential investment? Healthy children, healthy families, healthy communities. In economic terms, maternal and newborn deaths cost a combined 15 billion dollars per year in lost productivity, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development.

But the non-economic case for protecting new mothers' health is even more compelling. USAID says that newborns whose mothers die in childbirth are 10 times more likely to die within the first two years.

But getting wealthy countries to set aside money for people in a village halfway across the world - 99 percent of the about 350,000 women who die during pregnancy or childbirth each year are in developing countries - is never easy. This task is only further complicated when the topic of abortion looms on the sidelines of the discussion.

That topic was largely sidestepped at the three-day conference. Instead, the panels discussed empowering women with the family planning tools and information needed protect their own health and that of their families. Decreasing the number of pregnant adolescents globally was also on the wish list.

Not only do very young mothers face much worse odds that they or their child will survive childbirth, they also miss out on education. That education, in turn, makes it more likely women will utilize health care systems. It's a vicious cycle that, the Women Deliver says, can easily become a virtuous one with just a small investment.

'Improvements for women, children and girls create a positive ripple effect accelerating progress in all of our development goals,' said Ban.

'The truth is, we can prevent most of these [maternal and newborn] deaths — and at a stunningly low cost — if we take action,' said Gates in announcing her foundation's commitment.

The conference comes at what some see as a potentially pivotal time for maternal and child health. Those topics are expected to be prominently discussed at the G8 conference to be held in Muskoka, Canada, later this month.

In September, a summit on the MDGs will be held in New York. Ban hopes new commitments to reducing maternal mortality as well as the other MDGs will be made in the run up to that event.

'We truly are at a tipping point,' Women Deliver president Jill Sheffield said on the conference's first day. 'The first Women Deliver conference in 2007 started a movement, and we now see a convergence of elements and interests. This interest has to be turned into action. The time is right.'

Though progress has been spotty in the different areas of maternal health, a recent study showed that there is reason for hope. The study, published in the medical journal The Lancet in April, found that 35 percent fewer women are dying from pregnancy-related causes than 30 years ago. That means the over 500,000 deaths that occurred in 1980 were down to about 343,000 in 2008.

That is still a large number and still a ways from the three-quarters reduction from 1990 numbers sought by MDG 5, but most conference attendees felt that with greater awareness, commitment and investment substantial progress will be seen.

© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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