ASRM: World view
“It’s like three jumbo jets packed with pregnant women going down every day.” Now that’s the way to get attention.
Herbert Peterson, at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, was talking about the half a million women who still die every year from pregnancy and childbirth in the developing world. Another 8-9 million become sick.
So much of this meeting seems to focus on ways to help women who want to get pregnant and cannot – and yes this is important. But when you consider reproduction on a global level, infertility is only a small part of the equation. In many places, poor women are still having too many babies, in bad conditions and they don’t have much choice about it.
The world’s population is expected to rocket to over 9 billion by 2050 and all of this will happen in the poorest countries in the world. Women and children die or fall ill because they don’t have access to contraception or clinics.
People like Peterson advocate that all women should have a right to choose when and how many children they want to have, and that this would go a long way towards solving the planet’s ills. But the solutions involve strategies and capacity and infrastructure, all those words that always seem rather vague and impossible to achieve.