Lancet editorial: Moving forward with maternal health and human rights

27 June 2009
The Lancet

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.

The resolution signals an increasing trend by the human-rights community to take health issues as seriously as they have taken issues such as torture, the death penalty, and the right to a fair trial. For example, in May, Amnesty International-the world's largest international voluntary organisation dealing with human rights-launched, for the first time, a to address maternal mortality.

These efforts should be welcomed by the health community. As well as increased attention and resources for maternal health, a human-rights approach to maternal health can strengthen policies and programmes and make them more equitable. But this movement needs the active support and engagement of more health professionals to succeed. The difficulty is that the health community has often misunderstood human rights to be solely about whistleblowing, lawyers, and litigation. The health community must be willing to learn about human rights, realise the common ground, and work with human-rights professionals in a respectful, constructive, and practical partnership to prevent the unacceptably high number of maternal deaths that occur each year.