A 30-day series of quotes spanning two hundred years ~ click here to begin with Day 1
Speed readers and nerds can link to the entire series as a single long post
Day 12 ~ 2011 to 2014
2011 ~ Rachael Ward, director of research for Amnesty International USA and author of: “Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA.
When Rachel Ward of Amnesty-USA was interviewed about maternal mortality rates (MMR), she applauded the decline in maternal mortality rates worldwide but noted that the United States was one the exceptions.
“eight countries are bucking that trend, with the U.S. as the only developed nation among them.
.We’re not waiting for a medical breakthrough, what we’re waiting for here is the political will”
She went on to describe maternity care issues in the US as complex, systemic and basically political and includes the financial interests of the dominant system, and the ability of special-interest lobbying groups to endlessly perpetuate the status quo, irrespective of scientific evidence or common sense.
2014 ~ Excerpts from an On-line news story about rising maternal mortality rate in the US and work by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a global health research center at the University of Washington.
After the Institute gathered 20 years of worldwide maternal health data, their research team identified 18.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in the U.S., up from 12.4 deaths per 100,000 births in 1990.
Their most recent report, which was later published in the Lancet, American maternal mortality rates over that 20-year period rose at a rate that puts the U.S. in the company of war-torn countries like Afghanistan and impoverished nations like Chad and Swaziland. When Dr. Nicholas Kassebaum, lead author of the study and a Seattle Washington pediatrician, was interviewed he stated that
“the US ranks 60th in the world, which is below virtually every other developed nation. … We’re close to triple the (MM) rate of the U.K., and eight times higher than Iceland, the world’s leader”.
The best goes on!
