Service Above Self: Child and maternal health – Good news, really bad news

By Kitt Brand on March 24, 2026.

So, which do you want first, the good news or the bad? OK, good news first.

Child mortality (death) and morbidity (near death) in children have improved greatly since 1830, when one third of all children born in Alberta failed to live to their fifth birthday.

That’s 333 deaths per 1,000 births. With vaccinations and antibiotics, that rate has fallen sharply so that by 2020 the figures were five deaths per thousand live births. You math lovers, that’s a drop from 33.33 percent to 0.5 percent. Great news.

Why do Rotarians care? They care because internationally they support programs around the world that improve lives of mothers and children.

So, imagine my shock when I discovered the bad news: Alberta doesn’t have a system for tracking mortality and morbidity of birth mothers and children. As a nation, Canada is also somewhat deaf, dumb, and blind to the need for understanding what causes pregnancies to go awry and what interventions can save lives. As two researchers noted in Fly on the Wall: Improving maternal health outcomes in Canada 2024:

“For every one woman who dies, 85-100 nearly die” in child bearing. Says scientific observer Rohan D’Souze, “I do believe it’s an equity issue. Women’s health is often not prioritized. That’s the problem with our society.”

Shocker Alert: There is no national system to gather data about maternal deaths, near misses, or pregnancy outcomes. In fact, there are only seven provinces and territories that have any system for capturing information about pregnancy outcomes.

These so-called systems are incompatible. In fact, even maternal deaths are defined differently by region. Unimaginable!

There is no existing way in Canada to share conditions and responses to treatments that result in maternal death, serious conditions, or recovery. That’s staggering when doctors know that the three most frequent causes of death and near-death during pregnancy are pre-eclampsia, eclampsia, and hemolysis (the breakdown of red blood cells with elevated liver enzymes, and low platelets) – aka bleeding to death.

If you watched the “Downton Abbey” episode where the vigorous, sportsy youngest Crawley daughter went into eclampsia shock, you’ll understand. We do know in our family because my daughter was fortunately in a country with an active system for catching challenging pregnancies.

Careful testing indicated unexpected enzymes and raised blood pressure. She was under rigorous monitoring and was whisked to the hospital on the first signs of pre-eclampsia which occurred 24 weeks into her pregnancy. She lived.

There are still enduring consequences: high blood pressure, fibromyalgia – all managed 22 years later because her medical team had a common knowledge base and system for understanding best treatment practices.

She urges support for such knowledge sharing. Tragically, this is not available in Alberta or on a national platform.

Dr. Jocelyn Cook, chief scientific officer of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada, says no one knows the maternal mortality and morbidity figures for Canada. The World Health Organization and UNICEF both estimate Canada’s rates are as much as 60 per cent higher than what StatsCan reports for 2000-2020 deaths: 523 mother deaths.

This is double the rate of other high-income countries like Ireland, the Netherlands, and Japan.

As you can well hope, professionals in Alberta and across Canada have advocated for decades – decades! – that Canada implement a reporting and treatment system that is compatible with successful systems used in other countries. To what result, you ask? None.

How simple could it be for Health Canada to work with WHO and UNICEF to adopt a surveillance program that provinces and territories could adopt for gathering and sharing pregnancy health data to protect and save lives of mothers and children.

Our wonderful MP Glen Motz encouraged me to write to the Honourable Marjorie Michel, Minister of Health. A timely and personal response came from Michael Collins, vice president of Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Prevention Branch of the Public Health Agency of Canada.

He wrote that, “While the delivery and administration of health services are primarily the responsibility of provincial and territorial governments, the federal government works collaboratively with partners across jurisdictions to support public health surveillance, research, and knowledge sharing.”

Want to join in making our provincial leaders focus on this issue? Petition heaven?