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Moving Forward with Maternal Health and Human Rights

An editorial in the medical journal The Lancet reflects the work of Ford Foundation grantees, including the Human Rights Centre of the University of Essex. Their work is a product of the foundation's longstanding commitment to preserving, protecting and building awareness of sexuality and reproductive health as a fundamental human right.

Editorial published by The Lancet: June 27, 2009, Volume 373

500,000 women die each year as a result of pregnancy or childbirth. Efforts are being made to reduce these deaths by three quarters by 2015 — Millennium Development Goal 5. But many countries are not making substantial progress towards this target. Can the human-rights community help?

Last week, the UN Human Rights Council passed a landmark resolution that recognises preventable maternal mortality and morbidity as a pressing human-rights issue that violates a woman's rights to health, life, education, dignity, and information. The move is important because a human-rights approach to maternal health places specific legal and ethical obligations on states, such as the establishment of effective mechanisms of accountability (ie, maternal death audits or reviews). The approach also reinforces equity, so it insists on disaggregated data on maternal mortality and morbidity rates to see if vulnerable groups are benefiting from health programmes.

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