Not surprising.
After the 2003 war that toppled Saddam Hussein, the number of women who gave birth at home shot up to about two-thirds. Of those, 80 percent had nobody with any formal training present at the birth. Far from lifesaving emergency care, many mothers died from preventable complications.
Today, nobody knows exactly how many mothers are dying in Iraq. Violence has prevented medical experts from measuring the maternal mortality rate since late 2003, when the number of Iraqi women who died from childbirth climbed to 370 per 100,000 – triple its 1990 rates and 31 times the US rate of 12. The UN Population Fund concluded that the war and its aftermath had made an old problem “suddenly become very much worse.”