Yet another subject for the We Hate It When Things Get Better file.

Whenever anyone tells me that things are getting worse in the world, that we’ve fallen away from some great glorious golden age, I have many responses. But one of those has to be “childbirth”. In the natural unsullied state, one in fifty women dies giving birth. And it’s not a fun way to go. Were it not for modern medicine, I might very well have lost both my wife and daughter that way.

Thanks to modern technology, that rate has plunged to less than one in ten thousand in the industrialized world. And rates are plunging in the undeveloped world.

But advocates for better maternity care are unhappy about this, or at least unhappy about letting people know about it. They fear that the issue will lose its urgency (which, if it’s getting better, it sort of should, no?)