100 Things That Make Me Feel Better About The World: #004

[4am_secret]

http://youtu.be/UvcdSFCwrao

Every Mother Counts

Some statistics from their website:

1. Approximately 358,000 women die each year due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth. That's one woman every 90 seconds.

2. For every woman who dies each year in childbirth, 20-30 more suffer from lifelong debilitating disabilities.

3. Pregnancy is the number one cause of death in women, ages 15-19, in the developing world. Nearly 70,000 young women die every year because their bodies are not ready for parenthood.

4. Over 200 million women who would like to choose when they get pregnant don’t have access to family planning.

5. The United States ranks 50th globally in maternal mortality, even though it spends more on health care per capita than any other nation in the world. African American women are four times more likely to die in childbirth than Caucasian women.

From their facebook:

Every Mother Counts is an advocacy and mobilization campaign to increase education and support for maternal mortality reduction globally.

Description
Every Mother Counts seeks to engage new audiences to better understand the challenges and the solutions while encouraging them to take action to improve the lives of girls and women worldwide.

Every Mother Counts was founded by Christy Turlington Burns after the completion of her documentary debut, "No Woman, No Cry" which tells the personal stories of pregnant women and their caregivers in four countries as they try to avoid adding to these troubling statistics.

General Information
Hundreds of thousands of girls and women around the world die every year from complications in pregnancy or childbirth, creating a rippling effect that devastates children, families, and communities. Almost all of these deaths are preventable.

The issue
How you can help