Safe motherhood initiative: 20 years and counting.

摘要

The global campaign to reduce maternal mortality was launched in February, 1987, when three UN agencies-UNFPA, the World Bank, and WHO-sponsored the international Safe Motherhood Conference in Nairobi, Kenya. The event aimed to raise awareness about the numbers of women dying each year from complications of pregnancy and childbirth, and to challenge the world to do something.The origins of the conference dated from 1985, when two critical events focused the attention of public-health specialists on the horrific risks pregnancy posed for women in developing countries. In that year, Allan Rosenfield and Deborah Maine pointed out that maternal and child health programmes in developing countries were almost exclusively for the benefit of the child, with almost no attention to the factors that were causing women to die.That same year, during the conference marking the end of the UN Decade for Women, women's advocates from around the world heard WHO announce that half a million women were dying each year from obstetric complications.These two events began a groundswell of concern for key players, both institutional and individual, who came together to plan the Nairobi Safe Motherhood Conference and to launch the global Safe Motherhood Initiative. The 1987 Nairobi conference led to the formal establishment of the Safe Motherhood Inter-Agency Group (which included the three sponsors of the conference plusUNICEF, UNDP, and two international non-governmental organisations, IPPF and the Population Council), and to a series of regional and national conferences that made safe motherhood an accepted and understood term in the public-health realm. By the time of the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, every region of the world had held a safe motherhood conference, and safe motherhood was firmly ensconced as a core component of reproductive health. The importance of maternal survival was reinforced in 2000, when it was included as one of the eight Millennium Development Goals.