Mother’s Day — a day we put aside each year to celebrate mothers around the world. Between planning brunch or sending flowers, we tend to forget how lucky we are to have access to maternal health care and truly how dangerous motherhood can be. So dangerous that about 303,000 women die every year as a result of pregnancy and childbirth and about 99 percent of these deaths occur in developing countries. Only ten countries in the world account for over 60 percent of maternal deaths worldwide and of those, nine are currently in or recently emerging from conflict.

War and armed conflict disproportionately affect women and can turn what is supposed to be a joyous and beautiful experience — childbirth — into a horrific or even fatal one. War destroys health care systems and disrupts community networks, leaving no accountability or acknowledgement if and when things go wrong.

Even closer to home, maternal health is not at the level it should be. I grew up in the UK and now reside in the United States, and my family is from Ghana. Whilst maternal healthcare is certainly more advanced in the West, many developed nations still fell short of United Nations Millennium Development Goals, which aimed to improve maternal health. Even more surprising is that the United States is one of eight countries in which maternal mortality is rising.