Discoveries and dissimulations: the impact of abortion deaths on maternal mortality in British Columbia.

One of the most striking improvements in the health of Canadian women was brought about by the lowering of the risk of maternal mortality. Between the 1930s and 1960s the chances of dying in pregnancy fell from about 1 in 150 to 1 in 3,000. Maternal deaths, which in the early 1930s had accounted for 10 to 15 percent of all deaths among women in the child-bearing years, fell in three decades to 2 to 3 percent. This dramatic breakthrough was so welcomed that few have asked why it occurred so late. In the early nineteenth century about one-quarter of the deaths of women aged between 15 and 50 were related to pregnancy and its complications. With the onrush of medical improvements associated with Joseph Lister's discovery of antisepsis in 1867 there was the real possibility of eliminating many of the traditional causes of maternal death. Conditions did improve somewhat, but if one were to judge by the statistical data the gains made in the first decades of the twentieth century were still disappointingly modest. Whereas the infant mortality rate fell from 120 deaths per 1,000 live births at the beginning of the century to 68 per 1,000 by 1936, the maternal mortality rate continued to hover at about 5 per 1,000 and actually rose to a century high of 5.8 per 1 ,000 in 1 9 3 0 . 3