What Happened to Women and Children First?

The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood is hosting an event in Washington DC: The "Stories of Mothers Lost" includes an exhibit that displays a series of artistic fabric panels representing women in 19 countries around the world. The panels will be displayed from April 14th to May 9th at WVSA ARTiculate Gallery, 110 16th Street.Maternal, newborn and child survival are under-recognized, underfunded and undervalued as global health priorities. This week's Lancet (subscription required) highlights this topic, reporting that of the 68 countries that account for 97% of maternal and child deaths worldwide, only 16 are on track to meet MDG4; and 56 of the 68 countries report high or very high maternal mortality rates. Additionally, newborns - referring to infants less than 28 days old - account for 4 of the 10 million children who die in this category.Why is this the case? The article posits a number of factors - including human resources for health, insufficient and unreliable financial resources, and inter and intra-country inequities as possible constraints to progress; an earlier Lancet paper by Jeremy Shiffman uses a four point framework to examine the reasons behind why the global safe motherhood initiative in particular receives low political priority. Despite two decades of focused attention to safe motherhood, the initiative has problems in all four focal areas: fragmentation of involved actors, low power of ideas for portraying the issue, weak political context, and issue-specific characteristics like measurement and technically difficult interventions.While galvanizing activities around child and newborn survival are ongoing, a campaign by The White Ribbon Alliance (WRA) warrants mention. WRA is leading a global campaign - A Promise to Mothers Lost: Healthy Pregnancy and Safe Childbirth for All - to hold world leaders to account for the tragedy of maternal mortality during the upcoming meetings of the World Economic Forum in South Africa, the G8 Summit in Japan and the UN Call to Action in New York.Last week, WRA publicized appeals to both the IMF and the World Bank to increase funding to maternal health. Since its launch in 1999, the White Ribbon Alliance has been a leader among those working on maternal mortality, aiming to promote cross-national advocacy for safe motherhood. With members in 91 countries and National Alliances established in 11 - Burkina Faso, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malawi, Nepal, Pakistan, South Africa, Tanzania, Yemen and Zambia - WRA is amplifying the voices of people suffering from the greatest burden of morbidity and mortality of complications due to pregnancy and childbirth.