Consequences…
When mothers and children die or are sick, it affects not just their immediate families or communities but the whole nation. Ensuring their survival and well-being is crucial to a nation’s economic and social development. Not only will it result in a paradigm shift in the health of societies, it will also decrease inequity. 

Children who lose their mothers suffer the most. According to a study, in some developing countries, the risk of death for children under the age of five doubles or triples if the mother dies. Other studies point out that children who have lost their mothers are 10 times more likely to die within two years than those with both parents alive. Motherless children are less likely to receive healthcare and education as they grow up. Girls, in particular, suffer because they are forced to drop out of school to look after their younger siblings.

When a woman dies, there are significant social and economic losses. The death of a mother seriously impacts the income earning capacity of a household and is likely to lead to deepening poverty. When a mother dies, the care of her children and other household members is threatened. The responsibility falls upon either elderly relatives or young siblings, whose own vulnerability increases as a result. 

A mother who is malnourished and anaemic is less likely to deliver a healthy child. Such a child on the threshold of a new life is already compromised. 

One in every four adult women in developing countries suffers long or short-term illness due to pregnancy and childbirth. For each woman who dies, at least 30 develop chronic debilitating conditions. Between 58-80 per cent of pregnant women in developing countries develop acute health problems, and 8-29 per cent develop chronic health problems because of pregnancy.

Women lose more disability-adjusted life years (28 million) to maternal causes in developing countries than to any other cause. The disability adjusted life year is a summary measure that combines, for a particular population, the sum of years of life lost due to premature death due to a particular cause with estimates of the sum of years lived with disability due to the same cause