The Goal to improve maternal health stands out from the other Millennium Development Goals for its distressing failure to make any progress, lending weight to the argument that the framework for the Goals is creating a gender-blind allocation of resources. The rate of maternal mortality in developing countries has barely changed from the baseline 1990 level of 480 per 100,000 births; its comparison with an average figure of below 10 in developed countries is possibly the most stark evidence of global injustice. In parts of Africa and South Asia, the life expectancy of young women is akin to medieval Europe.

Mother and child, Rwanda © Heidi Martin

The importance of family planning in developing countries emerged originally from population concerns and there has been considerable success in bringing down high average fertility rates. Reproductive health education is now equally motivated by the principle of empowerment of women, as articulated in CEDAW which places an obligation on countries to ensure that women have the same rights as men to decide the "number and spacing of their children and to have access to the information, education and means to enable them to exercise these rights".

The majority of development agencies perceive the right to safe and high-quality abortion services as part of this vision for women's empowerment in reproductive health. Human Rights Watch estimates that 20 million unsafe abortions take place each year due to criminalization of the practice. In the context of international development, the US government considers that the concept of sex education has become too wide. As a result the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) is starved of a large percentage of its funding. Otherwise generous US funding for HIV/AIDS programmes imposes bias towards abstinence rather than safe sex, making the flawed presumption that the balanced gender relations found in the West are replicated in poor countries. The reality is that young women find themselves in desperately weak positions of social interaction from which to negotiate safe sex or no sex.

Help us to complete OneWorld Guides
Many important development issues are missing from our range of Guides. OneWorld wants to fill these gaps as part of our efforts to improve understanding of the issues faced by developing countries. We receive no funding for the production of our educational resources. Every small contribution helps!