Visual: Trends in Maternal Mortality
Authors: Ursula Gazely, Veronique Filippi, Oona MR Campbell, Wendy J Graham
BMJ Global Health, Vol 11, Issue 5; 18 May 2026; Commentary. Open access
Summary box
- Severe disruptions to global health financing threaten maternal health progress by destabilising fragile health systems and reversing gains in survival.
- Funding cuts also place maternal health data systems at risk, jeopardising countries’ ability to track maternal mortality, evaluate programmes, and target resources where they are needed most.
- A coordinated international response is needed to secure renewed investment in nationally led data infrastructure and prevent a growing void in the information required to improve maternal and newborn outcomes.
- Strengthening local and regional ownership is critical to ensuring the long-term sustainability and accountability for these data systems amid shifting global political priorities.
Main points
- Severe disruptions to global health financing threaten maternal health progress by destabilising fragile health systems and reversing gains in survival.
- Funding cuts also place maternal health data systems at risk, jeopardising countries’ ability to track maternal mortality, evaluate programmes, and target resources where they are needed most.
- A coordinated international response is needed to secure renewed investment in nationally led data infrastructure and prevent a growing void in the information required to improve maternal and newborn outcomes.
- Strengthening local and regional ownership is critical to ensuring the long-term sustainability and accountability for these data systems amid shifting global political priorities.
Call for action
Immediate, decisive action is required to reduce the risk of recreating a data desert for maternal survival in the 21st century. We call for a global convening—a multistakeholder process led by United Nations agencies, their regional offices, and other multilateral stakeholders—to support countries in assessing options and charting a proactive way forward in response to current funding challenges. This should involve strengthening nationally managed data systems that are more resilient to domestic and global political shifts. National governments must also maintain domestic support for population-level maternal mortality surveillance systems. A coordinated response is urgently needed to prevent widening data gaps that threaten fragile progress in maternal and newborn survival.
“Global maternal mortality has declined by approximately 40% between 2000 and 2023, yet progress has slowed in recent years, and the global maternal mortality ratio remains nearly three times higher than the SDG target.”
The Foreword, by Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus,
Director-General, World Health Organization
Since the turn of the century, the world has made huge strides against maternal mortality: a 40% reduction between 2000 and 2023. This report presents more good news: in 2023, for the first time, no countries fell into the extremely high maternal mortality category (defined as over 1,000 maternal deaths per 100 000 live births). Additionally, more than one-third of countries surveyed have very low maternal mortality. Real progress has occurred, including in some of the world’s poorest settings. For example, countries including Rwanda and Sri Lanka have reduced maternal mortality dramatically by expanding midwifery services and improving rural healthcare access – strategies that can be shared and adapted to other contexts. I applaud the countries that have achieved the progress reflected here. Their leadership proves that change is possible. These gains have been driven by advances in research and service delivery. For instance, the use of a simple, low-cost device called a ‘drape’, combined with WHO-recommended treatments, has been shown to reduce severe bleeding from post-partum haemorrhage by 60%, saving many lives. Providing maternal care during humanitarian emergencies through mobile clinics and health posts saves millions of women and babies who would otherwise miss out on lifesaving medical screenings, vaccinations and treatments. Despite these gains, progress has slowed since 2016, and reductions in maternal mortality are still far too slow to meet the targets in the Sustainable Development Goals. Today, somewhere in the world, a woman still dies from complications during pregnancy and childbirth every two minutes – an estimated 260,000 in 2023. Numbers can numb us, but it is crucial that we not normalize these events, when we know that nearly all the women in this report could have survived pregnancy and childbirth, if they had had sufficient access to lifesaving care before, during, and after delivery. Instead, many lacked access to modern contraception, were denied control over their pregnancies due to violence, or went without essential antenatal monitoring. Others reached health facilities too late, only to find them ill-equipped, lacking the necessary interventions, medications, or the ability to prevent, detect, and treat life-threatening complications like haemorrhage and infection. Preventable deaths from maternal mortality are deeply rooted in poverty and inequality. Nearly all occur in low-and middle-income countries and communities – the same countries and communities that will be hardest hit by reductions in funding for global health. A woman in sub-Saharan Africa is 400 times more likely to die in childbirth than a woman in Australia and New Zealand. Even as we work to expand access to services for maternal care, we must pay careful attention to the quality of those services and the skills of the health workers who deliver them, while also addressing other health needs that increase the risk of complications, including noncommunicable and communicable diseases. When the rights of girls and women are protected and they have access to the services and information they need to control their own lives and bodies, unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions and maternal deaths fall, while opportunities to participate in education and the workforce increase. Maternal mortality is not a mystery. We know why it happens, and we have the tools to prevent it. The question, therefore, is not whether we can end preventable maternal deaths, but whether we will.
Editor’s Note: Unsafe abortion is only mentioned at the end, but safe abortion not at all.