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If we can make maternal deaths as rare as in the healthiest countries, we can save 275,000 mothers each year

Maternal mortality was much more common in the past. It is much lower today, but global inequalities are still large.

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For most of human history, pregnancy and childbirth were very risky; mothers would die in at least 1 in 100 pregnancies.1

Since the average woman would have at least four or five children, the lifetime risk of dying from maternal causes would be at least 1 in 25.2 This was true everywhere.

Thankfully, that’s no longer the case. We’ve made huge strides in not only protecting infants in childbirth and the early stages of their lives, but we’ve also made it much safer for women.

But we’re not done yet. There are still huge inequalities in the risks of pregnancy across the world. Pregnant women in countries like Sierra Leone and Kenya are around 100 times more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth than those in countries like Norway, Sweden, or Germany.3 But it doesn’t have to be this way. We could save hundreds of thousands of lives a year by closing these gaps.

I’ve compared three scenarios in the chart below to clarify these points.

First, we can see that the situation today is awful. 286,000 women died from maternal causes in 2020.4 That’s 784 deaths per day on average, or one mother dying every two minutes.5

Second, we can consider the very high maternal mortality rates of the past. Particularly good long-term data is available for Finland or Sweden, which shows that in 1750, around 900 women died per 100,000 live births.6 Since there were 135 million births in 2020, I calculate that 1.2 million women would have died from maternal causes that year if these rates hadn’t improved.7 Things are much, much better than they used to be.

Finally, things can still be much better. We know this because some countries have maternal mortality rates that are far lower than the global average. And they all used to be in a similar position to the worst-off countries today. In Europe, the maternal mortality rate was 8 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2020. That’s around 25 times lower than the global average.8 If all countries could achieve the same outcomes as Europe, 11,000 women would have died from maternal causes in 2020 — a small fraction of the 286,000 deaths that occurred.9

Providing the best conditions for women everywhere would reduce the global death toll by 275,000 maternal deaths a year.

A bar chart titled "We could save 275,000 women from dying in pregnancy or childbirth if we achieved low maternal mortality rates everywhere." It compares three scenarios:

"The world is awful" shows 286,000 maternal deaths in 2020.
"The world is much better" estimates 1.2 million deaths if maternal mortality rates were as high as in the past (900 per 100,000 live births, like Finland and Sweden in 1750).
"The world can be much better" shows that deaths could drop to 11,000 if global rates matched those of the best-performing countries (8 per 100,000 live births, like Europe in 2020).

What’s crucial is that all three of these points are true at the same time. My colleague, Max Roser, wrote about this in more detail, using the example of child mortality.

Seeing how bad conditions were in the past shows that it’s possible to make massive progress in improving health outcomes. While these improvements have saved hundreds of thousands of women a year, we shouldn’t be satisfied with where we are. We know we could save hundreds of thousands more.

It’s unacceptable that the risk of pregnancy for some women is a hundred times higher than for others, and this is almost entirely the result of the lottery of where they were born.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Max Roser, Simon van Teutem, Saloni Dattani, and Edouard Mathieu for their comments and feedback on this article.

Continue reading on Our World in Data

What could be more tragic than a mother losing her life in the moment that she is giving birth to her newborn? Why are mothers dying and what can be done to prevent these deaths?

The chances that a newborn survives childhood have increased from 50% to 96% globally. How do we know about the mortality of children in the past? And what can we learn from it for our future?

It is wrong to think these three statements contradict each other. We need to see that they are all true to see that a better world is possible.

Endnotes

  1. We only have long-run estimates of maternal mortality for a few countries, such as Finland and Sweden. But even in these countries — which are some of the best-off ones today — maternal mortality rates were around 1000 per 100,000 live births back in the 18th century.

  2. If 1% of pregnancies resulted in maternal death, then this risk would increase to 4% to 5% if women had four or five children. Note that these high rates are still a reality for women in some of the poorest countries today because maternal mortality is high in many such places, and women often have more than 5 or 6 children on average.

  3. The maternal mortality rate in Norway is around 2 deaths per 100,000 live births. In Germany, it’s 4 deaths, and in Sweden it’s 5. In Sierra Leone, this rate was around 440 deaths per 100,000 in 2020; in Kenya, this rate was 530. That’s around 100 times higher. A handful of countries — including Nigeria, South Sudan, and Chad — have even higher rates, at more than 1,000 deaths per 100,000 births.

  4. This data comes from the UN’s Maternal Mortality Estimation Inter-Agency Group (MMEIG). This global figure can vary slightly depending on the source. The WHO’s Global Health Observatory, for example, estimates that 301,000 women died from maternal causes in 2020.

  5. We get this daily figure by dividing 286,063 by 365; then, the number per hour by dividing that figure by 24. This comes out at 32 per hour, or around one every two minutes.

  6. It’s unlikely that other countries would have lower rates than this.

  7. Of course, this is a hypothetical scenario. You could argue that we’d never have reached 135 million births per year without the improvements in global health and development that we’ve seen more broadly.

  8. The global average rate was 212 deaths per 100,000 live births based on estimates from the UN MMEIG.

  9. Since there were 135 million births, a rate of 8 deaths per 100,000 results in 11,000 deaths [135 million / 100,000 * 8 = 10,778].

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Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this article, please also cite the underlying data sources. This article can be cited as:

Hannah Ritchie (2025) - “If we can make maternal deaths as rare as in the healthiest countries, we can save 275,000 mothers each year” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/maternal-deaths-save-mothers' [Online Resource]

BibTeX citation

@article{owid-maternal-deaths-save-mothers,
    author = {Hannah Ritchie},
    title = {If we can make maternal deaths as rare as in the healthiest countries, we can save 275,000 mothers each year},
    journal = {Our World in Data},
    year = {2025},
    note = {https://ourworldindata.org/maternal-deaths-save-mothers}
}
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