Maternal mortality falls to all-time low

The World Health Organization says there were 260,000 maternal deaths across the globe in 2023, down from 267,000 in 2022 and 444,000 in 2000.

The maternal death rate has also fallen worldwide, from 328 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2000 to 197 in 2023. This is much lower than the maternal mortality rate in past centuries even in relatively wealthy nations like the United Kingdom, which had around 1,000 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births in the early 1700s.

Human Progress notes that

In the mid-19th century, Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that women who gave birth at home died at a lower rate than women who were assisted by doctors. He hypothesized that doctors, who did not wash their hands, passed diseases from other patients to pregnant women. Unfortunately, Semmelweis’s insight was strenuously opposed until, several years later, French biologist Louis Pasteur established a definitive link between germs and disease in the 1860s.

After doctors started to disinfect their hands, maternal mortality began to fall, first in Western countries and later in the rest of the world. The global maternal death rate fell from 385 per 100,000 live births in 1990 to 216 in 2015. That’s a reduction of 44 percent. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s poorest region, the number of maternal deaths fell from 987 to 547 over the same period—a reduction of 45 percent. Similar declines took place in all other geographical regions, and the United Nations expects that the maternal mortality rate will fall to 70 per 100,000 live births by 2030.