Maternal health and human rights

[Guest guest]

www.thelancet. com Vol 373 June 27, 2009

Editorial, page - 2172

Moving forward with maternal health and human rights 500 000 women die each year

as a result of pregnancy or childbirth. Eff orts 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, edu cation,

dignity, and information.

The move is important because a human-rights approach to maternal health places

specifi c legal and ethical obligations on states, such as the establishment of

eff ective mechanisms of accounta bility

(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 benefi

ting 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 global campaign 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 diffi culty 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. â–  The Lancet

For more on the UN Human Rights Council resolution see

http://www2. ohchr.org/ english/bodies/ hrcouncil/ docs/11session/ L-11.doc

For more on the Amnesty

campaign see http://www.amnesty. org.uk/content. asp?CategoryID= 11178

For more on maternal mortality

and human rights see http://righttomater nalhealth. org/

For more on the right to health see Lancet 2008; 372: 2047–85