Goal 5: Better health for mothers

The Millennium Development Goals, to be achieved by 2015, include:

Goal 5:  Improve maternal health

Here is the Millennium Development Campaign's web page on Goal 5.  As it says on that page, too often the day a baby is born is the day its mother dies.  To put this right there must be much better ante-natal services.  In many parts of the world basic health workers have been trained, or what have been called "bare-foot doctors".   

Contraception is also part of the answer, to allow mothers to limit the number of babies and to space out the births. 

As always development involves intertwining strands.  Goal 3 on gender equality and empowering women is clearly relevant and we need to think of nutrition and of education as well. 

Have a look at this blog entry on maternal deaths in Burkina Faso, written by the Amnesty media team. 

Update, March 2010:  Amnesty says that many women in the world are at as much risk of dying in childbirth as women in Britain were a century ago.