“There is still one woman dying every one and a half to two minutes somewhere in the world … Because she is trying to give life,” said Marleen Temmerman, who heads the WHO’s department of reproductive health and co-authored the report. “That is like having two airplanes crashing every day,” she told reporters in Geneva, insisting “this should be much higher on the agenda”. The WHO report emphasises that the dangers of childbearing are still felt far more acutely in the developing world, and in sub-Saharan Africa especially, than in wealthy countries. While a woman in Chad faces a one in 15 risk of dying during pregnancy and childbirth during her lifetime, the risk is more than 1,000 times smaller for a woman in Finland, the statistics show. African nations are heavily represented among the 10 countries that account for around 60 per cent of all maternal deaths globally, including Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Kenya. Several African nations meanwhile also figure among those who had succeeded in slashing their maternal mortality rates the most in the past 23 years, WHO said.

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