Sarah Brown and Ambassador Nancy Brinker
Sarah Brown, the Global Patron of the White Ribbon Alliance and the wife of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, returned to New York to advocate for governments and non-governmental organizations to lead the final push to prevent maternal death, the United Nations Millennium Development Goal #5.
“One-thousand women die every day in pregnancy and childbirth in avoidable, tragic circumstances,” said Sarah Brown, Global Patron of the White Ribbon Alliance. “We have seen some great progress in recent years to reduce these numbers, but our campaigning call continues.
Ms. Brown led the WRA’s ‘Wake Up Call for Women and Newborns of the World’ breakfast meeting, co-hosted by Arianna Huffington and Donna Karan, making a direct appeal for everyone to find their own way to help the maternal health campaign.
The packed event was part of the 2nd Annual Women: Inspiration & Enterprise (WIE) symposium and included the Second Lady Dr. Jill Biden, Ambassador Nancy Brinker from the Susan G. Koman Foundation, NBC’s Bonnie Hammer, CNN’s Hilary Rosen, Susan McCue from Message Global, actress Fran Drescher, author Rachel Simmons, Lucy Doughty and Theresa Shaver from the WRA.
Sarah Brown’s work with the White Ribbon Alliance began in 2008 and has since grown by “leaps and bounds” to a world-wide movement for improving the health care and livelihood of pregnant women. On MSNBC’s Mitchell Reports, Brown appeared with Angela Nguku of the WRA – Kenya and continued to voice the call to provide mothers everywhere with the basic supplies to have a healthy birth and avoid preventable deaths.
‘The mother is at the heart of her family, and at the heart of her community, so when you’re loosing a mother, she looses her life but her newborn is very unlikely to survive, and her older surviving children are at such risk without their mother, and the community’s lost a core member of that world too. When you’re losing a mother, you’re losing so much more than that single woman’s life,” said Brown.
Watch the full interview below:
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