Maternal Mortality Ratio without healthcare

Question

What is an estimation of Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR, number of mother death per 100000 births) without professional healthcare? In other words, how often women die during childbirth in some wild tribes which do not use modern healthcare at all and give birth at home? Or for example what was the MMR in the past, when women all gave births at home without or with poor medical assistance?

I am asking, because I stumbled upon an estimation, which I do not believe to be correct in a book. The estimation was that one of 8 women would die during childbirth without medical assistance. The book is "Brain Rules for Baby" by John Medina.

Answer 1

I believe the answer is somewhere between 0.5% and 1% (about 500-1000 deaths per 100000 births). Below is the list of the sources I reviewed. Some sources provide higher estimates, but those should be attributed to unsanitary conditions in hospitals in the past (in the past births in a hospital were more dangerous than at home, because of contamination by the doctors).

• Chamberlain Geoffrey. British maternal mortality in the 19th and early 20th centuries. J. R. Soc. Med. 2006;99:559–563.
• Loudon I. Deaths in childbed from the eighteenth century to 1935. Med Hist. 1986 Jan;30(1):1-41.
• Loudon I. Ignaz Phillip Semmelweis' studies of death in childbirth. J R Soc Med. 2013 Nov; 106(11): 461–463; doi: 10.1177/0141076813507844; PMCID: PMC3807776; PMID: 24158918
• Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie (2019) - "Maternal Mortality". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/maternal-mortality' [Online Resource]