The objective of Making Pregnancy Safer (MPS) is to ensure that governments and partner agencies receive guidance and technical support. MPS interventions help strengthen health systems, including improving access to and quality of health services, and enhance individuals', families', and communities' capacities to respond better to needs, to ensure that women and their newborn babies have access to and use the care they need when they need it.

While in most cases having a baby is a positive and fulfilling experience, pregnancy and childbirth can also be associated with suffering, ill health or even death. Interventions that can prevent maternal and newborn mortality from major causes are known and can be made available even in resource-poor settings.

JOINT STATEMENT ON MATERNAL AND NEWBORN HEALTH 
Accelerating Efforts to Save the Lives of Women and Newborns 

Every minute a woman dies in pregnancy or childbirth, over 500,000 every year. And every year over one million newborns die within their first 24 hours of life for lack of quality care. Maternal mortality is the largest health inequity in the world; 99 per cent of maternal deaths occur in developing countries – half of them in Africa. A woman in Afghanistan faces a 1 in 8 chance during her lifetime of dying of pregnancy–related causes, while a woman in Sweden has 1 chance in 17,400. 

On 25 September 2008, as world leaders gather for the High-Level Event on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), WHO, UNFPA, UNICEF and the World Bank jointly pledged to intensify their support to countries to achieve Millennium Development Goal 5 “To Improve Maternal Health” – the MDG showing the least progress. 

More