CALL FOR PAPERS

Reproductive Health Matters 15(30) November 2007

Theme: Maternal mortality and morbidity: is pregnancy getting safer for women?

Submission date: 1 March 2007

In 1987, the World Health Organization called the first of several global Safe Motherhood conferences. Since then, every couple of years, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, UNFPA and a number of NGOs try to stir up interest in reducing the continuing high rates of maternal deaths in the least served populations of women in poor countries. We’ve moved from “safe motherhood” to “making pregnancy safer” but women continue to die. Now the campaigns have reverted to pre-1987 behaviour and are being diverted from their focus on saving women’s lives to saving newborns. Reducing maternal mortality is one of the main Millennium Development Goals (remember them?) but has anything changed? Has maternal mortality gone down anywhere in the past decade? What about maternal morbidity: is anyone still focusing on that? Is pregnancy getting safer for women? RHM is looking for papers that attempt to answer any of these questions or related ones, which can include but are not limited to the following or related topics:

o Why have international campaigns to reduce and prevent maternal deaths been so poorly funded and too often poorly led for so many decades? To whom has the money actually gone? Where should it be going?

o Have health systems succeeded or failed to put the necessary emergency obstetric services (EOC) in place? Why? How?

o Have safe motherhood campaigns taken on board the fact of AIDS as an important cause of death, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa?

o What about war and conflict situations? What is the effect on pregnant women?

o Have more countries begun to train midwives to WHO standards and give them responsibility for more aspects of EOC in the absence of enough obstetricians?

o What are the human resources available for antenatal, delivery and post-partum care and for EOC?

o With the increase in education levels among women in many countries, is there greater awareness of what a healthy pregnancy requires and what the danger signs are during pregnancy? Do women’s magazines and the media address these issues?

o Is abortion-related mortality being addressed as part of maternal mortality? Is most abortion-related mortality now mainly from unsafe second trimester abortions, now that abortion pill use is so widespread?

This journal issue will be part of an initiative to publish papers in October 2007 on Poverty and Human Development involving 120+ journals worldwide, organised by the Council of Science Editors. See their website www.councilscienceeditors.org/globalthemeissue.cfm.

RHM Author and Submission Guidelines are at: www.rhmjournal.org.uk.