EDITORIAL: A UN report, released on April 7 in conjunction with the World Health Day, places Pakistan in the unenviable company of three other countries – Nigeria, India (this might be of consolation for some) and Democratic Republic of the Congo – which accounted for almost half (47 percent) of the estimated 260,000 maternal deaths worldwide in 2023.
In a statement issued on the occasion, Islamabad office of the World Health Organization made the gloomy disclosure that every day 27 mothers and 675 under one-month-old babies die from preventable complications in Pakistan, amounting to over 9,800 maternal and 246,300 newborn deaths each year.
Added to these depressing statistics annually are 190,000 stillbirths. Conditions have improved over the past few years at a rather slow pace, though. The maternal mortality ratios, for instance, fell from 276 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2006 to 155 in 2024.
Meanwhile, neonatal mortality declined from 52 deaths per 1,000 live births to 37.6 and stillbirth fell from 39.8 per 1000 birth in 2000 to 27.5 in 2024.
As the WHO representatives in Pakistan Dr Dapeng Luo rightly averred, spending on maternal and newborn health is an investment in human capital, not a cost, leading to economic development and happier, healthier societies. But few in this country seem to subscribe to this sensible view.
A major reason mother and child mortality rate is so high is the phenomenon of underage girls marriages.
Even though Sindh led the way to discourage the trend, enacting Child Marriages Restraint Act, 2013, but implementation there too is rare, if at all. These young brides are at a higher risk of developing pregnancy-related complications, in many cases over and over again. They are also less likely to have gone to school and hence unable to understand what they need to know about their bodies to stay healthy and make decisions about childbearing. That is bad enough; then there is lack of quality health services, especially in rural areas, needed during pregnancy, child birth as well as postnatal healthcare.
Nor is there any serious effort to improve access to family planning services, with the result that young girls/women keep having more and more children susceptible in the process to losing their lives or of their newborns. Universal healthcare, unfortunately, gets least attention in governmental order of priorities.
As the WHO official astutely observed, spending on maternal and newborn health is an investment in human capital, not a cost. They way forward, beyond provision of quality healthcare, is to maximise girls’ enrollment in schools and also ensure that they complete schooling. For, education empowers individuals, girls or boys, to access information and services making educated choices beneficial for themselves as well as society at large.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
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