Tallahassee moms would be better off in 27 other countries, according to the 11th annual Mother's Index, released this week by Save the Children. According to the non-profit organization, the index is based on an analysis of indicators of women's and children's health and well-being. The U.S. ranked so low because of its maternal mortality rate -- one in 4,800 -- one of the highest in the developed world.
The best places to be a mom are apparently Norway and Australia, followed by Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand, Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. Each of those countries is known for having generous maternity leave policies.
The worst place to be a mother is, unsurprisingly, Afghanistan. Fewer than 15 percent of births are attended by skilled health personnel in Afghanistan and Chad, another of the lowest ranking countries. One child in five does not reach his or her fifth birthday in Angola, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia. In Afghanistan, child mortality rates are higher than 1 in 4.
Those statistics put into perspective the U.S. stingy maternity leave policies. "While the situation in the United States needs to improve, mothers in the developing world are facing far greater risks to their own health and that of their children," said Mary Beth Powers, Save the Children's Newborn and Child Survival Campaign Chief. "The shortage of skilled birth attendants and challenges in accessing birth control means that women in countries at the bottom of the list face the most pregnancies and the most risky birth situations, resulting in newborn and maternal deaths."
The mission of Save the Children is to create lasting, positive change in the lives of children in need in the U.S. and around the world.
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Comments (3)
I can attest to the "best mom" status of Australia. I have a friend who lives in Perth. She gave birth to her first child in Orlando, FL and to her second child in Perth. She said the experiences were like night and day. The government paid for a nurse to come to their house three times a week for six weeks, just to check up on her and her newborn and to assess for postpartum depression. She said the level of support for new mothers is amazing and is one of the few things that she definitely says the US could improve upon.
The maternal leave policies in Spain are also amazing; they actually allow women to leave their jobs to go and nurse their babies three times a day. This, AFTER coming back from a minimum six month PAID maternity leave.
Can you imagine such a thing in the US? We talk the "family values" talk, but lip service is really all that it is compared to other countries.
I wish I could say that this shocked me, but we are so far behind where we could and should be in this country. My second baby and only son was stillborn almost twelve years ago (at full term after a normal, uneventful pregnancy) and after that happened I tried to find out how often stillbirth occurs in the US and discovered that we do not even have a very good system for keeping track of fetal deaths. It's changing little by little as some states are giving parents of stillborn babies birth certificates (19 states so far!) rather than just death certificates. After Dylan died it was really eye opening to us to discover how many people we already knew who had lost a child to stillbirth, before that I think we would have said we knew no one. Our whole health care system has such a long way to go for improvement.
What an eye opener.
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