The maternal mortality picture in Armenia is somewhat complicated. Economic times have left much of the health care system for maternal, preventative and contraceptive care in shambles. The result is a cascading series of events that has cased the official estimates of maternal mortality to increase over 60% over the last decade to a level that is nearly double average of Armenia’s European neighbors 1 2.
Currently the reported maternal mortality rate is about 55/100,000 live births 3.It is estimated that at least 60-70% of all the deaths are easily preventable with simple care for hemorrhaging in regular births or abortions 4. Because the overall birthrate is relatively low there are between 200 and possibly up to 400 (if the unreported number hold true here as they often do that upwards of 50% of deaths are not reported properly) maternal deaths per year it is not an insurmountable problem. Like most problems regarding the health of mothers it is the lack of political will to step in and help that is the main problem. Not the availability of care or the knowledge on how to solve the problem. All of the basic infrastructure exist already. It just needs to be deployed in a way consistent with the known practices for reducing maternal mortality.
- UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) – Armenia Concluding Observations – 2003 para 28 ↩
- UNFPA – State of the World Population 2006 – A Passage to Hope – Women and International Migration – 2006 pg94-96 ↩
- UN Statistical Database, http://unstats.un.org/unsd/default.htm 2000 ↩
- UN – Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) – 1999 para 86 ↩
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