For my files:-)

Callaghan noted the U.S. had once set a goal of bringing its rate of maternal deaths down to 3.3 per 100,000 live births by 2010. The country has made no progress toward reaching that goal, he said.

In fact, the government has now given up on it. Now, it proposes to reduce maternal deaths to 11.4 per 100,000 live births by 2020.

While the national rate stood at 12.7 in 2007, and seems virtually stuck there, state rates vary widely.

Only five states met the 2010 standard, and Oregon was not one of them. Its rate was twice as high. Nationally, rates currently range from 1.2 in Maine to 34.9 in Washington, D.C.

***

In “Deadly Delivery,” Amnesty International noted that a woman is five times more likely to die in childbirth in the U.S. than in Greece, which has the world’s lowest maternal mortality rate.

The United Nations releases a new report every five years. The United States ranked 41st in child mortality in the 2005 report, but had slipped nine spots to 50th by 2010.

The United States averaged 12.7 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2009, up from 7.1 a decade earlier. Nearly every industrialized nation in the world does better than that, as do several developing nations, according to the U.N.
of which lead to lasting impairment.

In the U.S., it said, “Severe complications that result in a woman nearly dying, known as a ‘near miss,’ increased by 25 percent between 1998 and 2005. During 2004 and 2005, 68,433 women nearly died in childbirth in the U.S.A. More than a third of all women who give birth in the U.S.A. – 1.7 million women each year – experience some type of complication that has an adverse effect on their health.”

What’s more, at least half of maternal deaths occurring in this country are preventable, according to the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

http://www.newsregister.com/article?articleTitle=danger+in+delivery%3A+despite+technology%2C+u.s.+trails+entire+western+world+in+saving+mothers--1326911281--2454--home-news