The Status of Motherhood in the US

All is not well with the status of motherhood in the United States. While we’ve become more empowered in our right to choose whether or not we want children and how we balance family life, we’ve not fully claimed our power in the way it all begins: birth.

You would imagine that the wealthiest country in the world would take care of its mothers.

And yet…

We fall behind 49 other countries in our rate of maternal death, despite spending more per capita on maternity care than any other nation.

A woman giving birth in the US today is more likely to die in childbirth than her mother was…an unacceptable fact in this progress proclaiming nation. In fact, no progress has been made in twenty years.

Something is wrong. It’s not a woman’s ability to give birth. Our bodies are wise and have been capable since the beginning of time.

It’s extremely difficult to pinpoint just what is going wrong because we have no accurate system for recording and reviewing maternal deaths. Only six out of fifty states make it mandatory to report maternal deaths. Another unacceptable fact.

I wonder how this is possible in this great nation of ours. The time is clearly ripe for mothers to unite in critical masses and accelerate change.

We have a huge opportunity in this. We are actually being called to birth our own potentials to create a different world. A world where a woman giving birth is not losing her human rights, but is rather a woman claiming her awesome creative power. Read more in my article on Gender Across Borders. And let me know your thoughts!
http://www.genderacrossborders.com/2011/10/20/birthing-our-own-potential/

**If you live in the US, please use this one click tool to contact your members of Congress and urge them to co-sponsor the Maternal Health Accountability Act (HR 894) which will give states the resources to report and investigate all pregnancy-related deaths.
http://action.momsrising.org/letter/StopMaternalMortality/