Elevated fertility rates, combined with weak access to basic health-care and maternity services, can have lifelong implications for women’s survival.

In the developing world as a whole, a woman has a 1 in 76 lifetime risk of maternal death, compared with a probability of just 1 in 8,000 for women in industrialized countries. A woman in sub-Saharan Africa has a 4.5% chance of dying from causes related to pregnancy in her life.

The average lifetime risk of a woman in a least developed country dying from complications related to pregnancy or childbirth is more than 300 times greater than for a woman living in an industrialized country.

Source: World Health Organization, United Nations Children’s Fund, United Nations Population Fund and the World Bank, Maternal Mortality in 2005: Estimates developed by WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA and the World Bank, WHO, Geneva, 2007, p. 35.