Meg Wirth

Founder, Maternova

Saving Mothers and Babies Through the Web

When a single idea can save the life of a mother giving birth in a remote pocket of the world, Meg Wirth gets the word out.

Wirth is the founder of Maternova, a new Internet “marketplace” for safe and simple birthing technologies that could mean the difference between life and death for mothers and newborns around the globe. According to Wirth, the site “organizes innovation” to keep key people — clinicians, designers, manufacturers, distributors and philanthropists — informed about the breadth of current technology in the field of maternal and neonatal health.

It is a potentially life-saving hub that creates a visual representation of innovations in this critical area of medical care.

“Innovation has to be continually directed and taken into where the gaps are,” Wirth says. The point is not to waste energy and resources when lives hang in the balance. Wirth notes, for instance, that there are several companies working on neonatal incubators, but not enough ways to prevent the postpartum hemorrhaging that causes most maternal deaths during childbirth.

Maternova helps to make this perilous gap more noticeable to people who might be able to close it.

The subject of maternal health care became a personal cause for Wirth while she was an undergraduate at Harvard University. Her degree was in visual and environmental studies, but when she took a class with Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, the “Mother Teresa of economics,” she learned about infanticide and selective abortion practices that were killing huge cohorts of girls in cultures that privileged male children.

“It struck me that it was a tremendously important issue for human justice and human development,” Wirth says. “Within that whole issue, I felt that maternal mortality was something that tended to be overlooked. To me, it was the saddest way to die — in giving life. I think that’s why I was drawn to this issue.”

Wirth learned about maternal mortality rates when she later worked at a maternity hospital in Borneo, Indonesia.

She lived in the hospital, a cement structure with roughly painted equipment, old beds and a cistern of water for bathing. Worms swam in the water. The partners in charge of the research project felt that it would be the safest, cleanest place for Wirth to live while she was there.

“If nothing else gave me credibility in the field, I suppose that did,” she says.

Despite the challenging conditions in the Borneo hospital, Wirth says she "learned from some phenomenal experts in global health.”

Since then, she has investigated health systems around the globe, from Vietnam to rural Kentucky, and has discovered that the most basic implements and ideas can save a pregnant woman’s life.

Innovations on the Maternova portal include an obstetric measuring tape to assess fetal growth, a plastic funnel to detect fetal heart rate, a string of colored beads to help women keep track of their menstrual cycles, and plastic bags to capture and calibrate postpartum blood loss.

But what midwives in underdeveloped regions desperately need isn’t always in the medical kit. What they get most excited about, according to Wirth, is light.

“Most deliveries happen at home, and at least half of them happen at night, but most places don’t have electricity,” Wirth explains. “There is a tremendous need for light to see the baby. And if you have tools, you have to be able to read them.”

Headlamps for midwives and solar-infused fabrics that emit light are helping to address this problem.

Maternova is already evolving. Originally conceptualized as a media platform, it is now moving in the direction of supply and distribution, according to Wirth. “The feedback was, ‘that’s great—but I’m a nurse and I don’t want to read about those things, I want to have them.’”

Wirth says that Maternova is currently assembling a postpartum hemorrhage kit so that health care workers on the front lines don’t have to spend precious hours trolling the Web for these life saving medical supplies.

Maternova is also developing a crowdsourced, interactive map of maternity clinics around the globe to provide some concrete visual data on areas of need. Wirth says, “We want to know where women have died, where women could have gone to be saved.”

Wirth acknowledges that saving mothers and babies entails more than just tools and gadgets. Cultural and political practices are the biggest obstacles to promoting healthy births on a global scale. Yet she sees Maternova playing an increasingly crucial role in a fundamental human rights issue. So far, 180 countries have visited the Web site, mostly by way of physicians running clinics that are not yet charted on the Maternova map.

It’s all one big puzzle, Wirth says, and Maternova is working on one vital piece of it.