Abstract
The PLOS Medicine editors and the Maternal Health Task Force announce a new call for papers on the theme of “maternal health is women's health.”
Highlights
This Year 2 Collection follows the successful first year of our partnership, which generated a collection of 18 original articles on the quality of maternal health care and helps us further our collective goal to improve women’s and children’s health worldwide through greater access to more comprehensive maternal health information and knowledge
Our continued commitment to highlighting and pressing for more evidence on maternal health reflects the persistence of this problem around the world: while the number of maternal deaths overall is declining, Millennium Development Goal 5 is the goal most lagging behind due to a lack of progress in a critical number of countries [1,2]
While pregnancy is limited to women of reproductive age, maternal health is influenced by the health of women and girls before pregnancy, and it influences women’s health broadly during and after the reproductive years
Summary
A number of childhood factors exist that may influence girls’ future pregnancies. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies, illiteracy, the low social status of women, poverty, and cultural practices such as female circumcision, rationing food to female children, and child marriage threaten girls’ health and increase in pregnancy the risk of obstructed labor, fistula, obstetric emergencies, and HIV infections, among other complications [3,4,5]. All but 5% of adolescent births occur in developing countries, where complications related to pregnancy and childbirth are a leading cause of death for girls aged 15–19 years [8]. For women of all ages, HIV/AIDS is an increasingly important indirect cause of maternal death, in part because of the increasing number of infections among sexually active women and because the proportion of women living with HIV/ AIDS is increasing [7]
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