This piece was originally posted on Thomson Reuters Foundation: Trust Law.
Looking back along two centuries of my family’s ancestral maternal lines, I realise that the lives of my Scottish foremothers were tragically defined and restricted by the dark shadow of poverty.
Back then, women had no real choices about how many babies they conceived and delivered, or how frequently. But that reality continues to exist today for 222 million women worldwide.
Every day 800 women and girls lose their lives in childbirth or during pregnancy. To feel the true weight of what this means, we have only to look back to past generations of our own families, or draw on the pain each of us feels at the loss of someone we love.
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