via sebarave @ flickr
April 11 is National Safe Motherhood Day in India, an event organized by the White Ribbon Alliance. The Alliance is a group dedicated to raising awareness of global maternal health issues and the challenges women face in obtaining proper obstetric care. Those challenges are particularly notable in India, where 75,000 to 100,000 women (a figure equivalent to the entire population of Albany, New York) die every year in childbirth. Only 47% of Indian mothers are able to receive care by skilled attendants during childbirth, and the country’s child mortality rates are also devastatingly high — two million Indian children died before their fifth birthday in 2006. It is worth noting that these figures are improvements over even higher mortality rates from fifteen to twenty years ago, but there is clearly a long way to go.