Preliminary Programme

According to the Annual Reports of the Registrar General Irish maternal mortality rates were low by international standards, but if individual-level data are considered then rural Ireland emerges as a problem. This paper discusses how personal metadata or small data can speak to big data in the context of maternal mortality. It problematizes the use of linked data methods to identify regional variations in maternal mortality rates and offers discussion of the socio-economic contexts that gave rise to these trends (Show less)

Although the high rate of maternal mortality in pregnancy during the 1918 influenza pandemic was recognised at the time and studied since 1918 and in subsequent outbreaks of H1N1 viruses, there has been much less scrutiny of the viruses effect on rates of maternal mortality shortly after birth. This may partly be because of the need to associate a female’s death to a preceding birth, a fact that may not have been noted in routine death records. In this paper we will discuss recent methodological work linking birth registrations to subsequent registrations of a mother’s death within the Scottish civil registration system and the use of the subsequent measures to assess the impact of the 1918 influenza pandemic on rates of maternal mortality. (Show less)

Building on the current debate on the certification and codification of the causes of maternal deaths, this paper analyses the conceptual evolution of maternal mortality and its impact on the demographic and epidemiological pattern of such deaths. Furthermore, it proposes a reflection on the formulation of the health policies and strategies introduced in the past as well nowadays to reduce maternal mortality and promote maternal health. (Show less)

A limited amount of research has been dedicated to the analysis of maternal mortality in the
past in the Southern European countries. In recent years, some studies have been proposed, but
the determinants of the temporal evolution of childbirth mortality and, even more, the causes
of the significant territorial differences observed remain to be investigated also in the Italian
case, the most documented one.
For this country, the analyses have been conducted for macro-regional areas or for single
communities at the individual level and have led to the identification of territorial variations,
mainly attributed to the different forms of professional assistance to women during pregnancy,
childbirth and the postnatal period. The limited presence of professional midwives and the
prevalent women’s reliance on traditional handywomen have been considered key elements
affecting the higher risks of childbirth mortality in certain areas of the country, but this
interpretation is not free from critical issues and must be better supported by empirical data.
Furthermore, other aspects relevant to reproductive health, such as differences in fertility
behaviours, female general health and survival conditions, women’s nutritional and
occupational status, etc. have almost been ignored.
In this paper we intend to propose a first finer-grained analysis of the geography of childbirth
mortality in Italy in the initial phase of the health transition, using a set of explicative variables
which try to capture some of the aspects just mentioned, in order to illustrate the variability of
the phenomenon at the provincial level and try to identify some of its potential determinants.
Thanks to a critical examination and exploitation of the official quantitative sources (causes of
death statistics, health surveys, archival documents) and an in-depth analysis of the qualitative
research on motherhood and childbirth assistance, carried out in the historical and
anthropological fields, this contribution aims to favour a deeper comprehension of the factors
affecting childbirth mortality in the country at the turn of the 20th Century (Show less)