A new study says fewer women in developing nations are dying of pregnancy-related causes. Researchers estimated how many mothers died during or soon after childbirth in one hundred eighty-one countries. They found a drop of more than thirty-five percent worldwide in the past thirty years.

By their count, the number fell from more than a half-million in nineteen eighty to about three hundred forty-three thousand in two thousand eight. That year, about two hundred fifty mothers died for every one hundred thousand live births worldwide.