Hundreds of deaths today alone could have been prevented.
Happy Mother’s Day! Your mom is the best!
Save, of course, for mine. And my wife. And, I rush to add, my mother-in-law.
I can’t think of any group of people more selfless and loving than mothers. But this celebration of motherhood is also hypocritical: For all our rhetoric, we routinely fail mothers here in the U. S. and around the world.
On this Mother’s Day, if it’s like the average day, another 830 women will die around the globe from pregnancy or childbirth. That’s one woman dying every two minutes. Indeed, in much of the world, just about the most dangerous thing a woman can do is become pregnant.
In the United States, an average of almost two women die in childbirth each day, and nearly a dozen from cervical cancer. For all our warm thoughts about moms, an American woman is twice as likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth as a woman next door in Canada. A black American woman is more likely to die from pregnancy, according to data from a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, than a Mexican woman.
Tragically, President Trump’s actions appear to be increasing the risks to moms both in the U. S. and abroad. More on that in a moment.
In Cameroon I watched a mother of three named Prudence Lemokouno, 24, fighting for her life after suffering obstructed labor. An untrained birth attendant sat on her stomach, rupturing her uterus. Her husband took her by motorcycle to the hospital, but the staff wasn’t interested in helping.
I pleaded with a nurse and warned that Lemokouno might die. The nurse shrugged and said, “That would be God’s will.”
Sure enough, Lemokouno died. The cause of death wasn’t just obstructed labor but also an indifference to the lives of impoverished women like her, both at the local level and around the world.
