“Life and death is a political decision because we know what works and needs to be done.” according to UN Population Fund (UNFPA) Executive Director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, a point surely not lost on Americans who have witnessed health care becoming a political football in this country. Speaking about the estimated 500,000 maternal mortality deaths that occur globally every year, she emphasized that the cost of preventing those deaths is, relatively speaking, minuscule compared to the amount that is spent on military spending:
“It would cost the world $23 billion per year to stop women from having unintended pregnancies and dying in childbirth, and to save millions of newborns. This amounts to less than 10 days of global military spending. Instead, the world loses $15 billion in productivity each year by allowing mothers and newborns to die.”
Got your calculators out? If you subtract lost productivity from the cost of ending these deaths, the net cost to save 500,000 women’s lives is a mere $7 billion dollars. Here in the U.S. we have spent more than $915 billion since 2001 on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 9 years, at a net cost of $63 billion dollars, less than 7% of the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lives of 4.5 million women could have been saved. It would have been a bargain.
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Shortly after I posted this, I read that Ford just posted a quarterly net profit of $1 billion dollars. We’re willing to spend our money on vehicles that guzzle gas that we shortly won’t have, but not on the more than 70,000 women whose lives could have been saved with that same amount of money. What does it say that we value cars and war far more than the lives of women?
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