A press release from Save the Children:
The United States continues its descent in the global rankings of best and worst places for mothers, slipping to 33rd out of 179 surveyed countries, reveals Save the Children’s new report, “State of the World’s Mothers 2015: The Urban Disadvantage.” Norway rose to the top of the list, which was released today, while Somalia remained last for the second year.
32 countries do better than we do.
That could be all right – somebody has to do best, and it’s not written in the stars that it should be the US. But we’re a very rich country, so, really, if we’re that far down the table…we’re doing something wrong. Not that we didn’t already know that.
The report indicates that women in the United States face a 1 in 1,800 risk of maternal death. This is the worst level of risk of any developed country in the world. An American woman is more than 10 times as likely to eventually die in pregnancy or childbirth as a Polish woman. And an American child is just as likely to die as a child in Bosnia and Herzegovina or Serbia.
The worst level of any developed country in the world. Ugh. That’s shaming.
You know what it is. It’s because we rely on poverty. We want poverty; we don’t want to get rid of poverty. Why? Cheap docile labor, that’s why. Profit. We care far more about the ability of a few people to get obscenely rich than we do about the ability of all people to do well enough.
Here are 1-33:
RANK COUNTRY 1 Norway
2 Finland
3 Iceland
4 Denmark
5 Sweden
6 Netherlands
7 Spain
8 Germany
9 Australia 1
0 Belgium
11 Austria
12 Italy
13 Switzerland
14 Singapore
15 Slovenia
16 Portugal
17 New Zealand
18 Israel
19 Greece
20 Canada
21 Luxembourg
22 Ireland
23 France
24 United Kingdom
*25 Belarus
*25 Czech Republic
27 Estonia
*28 Lithuania
*28 Poland
*30 Croatia
*30 Korea, Republic of
32 Japan
33 United States of America