maternal mortality

…to curtail their fertility, but maternal mortality rates skyrocketed as women sought unsafe and outlawed means to terminate their pregnancies. In an effort to pay off the large foreign debt that his government had accumulated through its mismanaged industrial ventures in the 1970s, Ceaușescu in 1982 ordered the export of…

…the 19th century, the recorded mortality was about 75 percent, and fetal craniotomy—in which the life of the child is sacrificed to save that of the mother—was usually preferred. Eventually, however, improvements in surgical techniques, antibiotics, and blood transfusion and antiseptic procedures so reduced the mortality that cesarean section came…

…had comparatively lower rates of maternal mortality than those areas where women relied on untrained helpers or delivered alone, even when the overall maternal mortality rates were quite high.

…illegitimacy, or obstetrical complications faced mortality rates ranging as high as 25–30 percent. Some thought that the infection was induced by overcrowding, poor ventilation, the onset of lactation, or miasma. Semmelweis proceeded to investigate its cause over the strong objections of his chief, who, like other continental physicians, had reconciled…