Understanding the issues

Choice for women: wanted pregnancies, safe births

View the picture gallery above and find out more about the urgent issues related to maternal and reproductive health.

Key facts and stats

• More than a third of a million women die every year from complications during pregnancy and childbirth. For every woman that dies another 20 women suffer from chronic ill-health or disability.
• More than 3.5 million newborn deaths (accounting for more than 40% of deaths to children under five years of age) occur in the first month of life – up to 45% of these in the first 24 hours.
• The global shortfall in trained professional health workers is more than 4 million.
• There are 215 million women in the developing world who would like to delay or avoid a pregnancy, but do not have access to modern family planning methods – each year there are 75 million unintended pregnancies.
• Girls aged 15-19 are twice as likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth than women in their twenties – and girls under 15 are five times more likely to die.
• Every year 19% (35 million) of all pregnancies in the developing world end in induced abortion. The data is difficult to track but an estimated 20 million of these abortions are conducted under unsafe circumstances and result in up to 70,000 maternal deaths each year.
• An estimated 8 million women need medical treatment for complications following unsafe abortion procedures each year but only 5 million receive that care.
• More than 2 million HIV positive women across the world are pregnant each year, more than 90% of them live in developing countries.
• The most recent estimates suggest that there are 125 million pregnancies at risk of malaria and of these more than 30 million are in sub Saharan Africa.

Find out how the Department for International Development is working to improve maternal and reproductive health.