Advances in Anthropology, 2019, 9, 56-69 http://www.scirp.org/journal/aa ISSN Online: 2163-9361 ISSN Print: 2163-9353 DOI: 10.4236/aa.2019.91004 Jan. 22, 2019 56 Advances in Anthropology Understanding the Trends of Maternal and Neonatal Mortality in Bangladesh in the Context of South Asia Halima Akhter 1 , Md. Mahbubur Rahman Alam 2 1 Department of Anthropology, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh 2 Department of Statistics, Dhaka University, Dhaka, Bangladesh Abstract Introduction: This article is presenting the overall situation of maternal and neonatal health in Bangladesh in comparison to other South Asian countries. Bringing down the maternal mortality ratio from 569 to 143 was the target for Bangladesh which was achieved up to 176 per 100,000 live births by 2015 but the target as per the Millennium Development Goal 5 was not fulfilled yet and remained as a challenge. Besides, the improvement in reducing the neonatal mortality rate during 1993-2014 shows a national level decline from 52 to 28 per 1000 live births, which is almost half during this period with a percentage change of about 46% and so more care is needed here also. Objectives and Methods: The manuscript has three objectives: to present the trends of ma- ternal and neonatal mortality, to explain the maternal and neonatal mortality rate by background characteristics and the causes of maternal and neonatal deaths in Bangladesh on the basis of South Asian perspective. The main source of data collection and analysis was the secondary sources, from different journals and project reports published between the years 2001 to May 2018. Main Text: In Bangladesh, 35% maternal deaths occurred as indi- rect causes and 9% causes of deaths are still remaining unidentified. In addi- tion, hemorrhage (31%) and pre-eclampsia-eclampsia (20%) are found two vital causes of maternal deaths with two more causes which are due to ob- structed labor (7%), and termination of pregnancy (1%). It is found that Ban- gladesh has shown a great improvement in maternal mortality ratio by re- ducing maternal mortality to 176 in 2015 from 569 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1990, with an increase of 69% as progress. On the other hand, it is found that 43% of neonatal deaths in Bangladesh occurred due to birth as- phyxia, 24% due to neonatal pneumonia, 22% due to prematurity, 5% due to sepsis, 0.2% due to meningitis and encephalitis, 0.1% due to congenital mal- How to cite this paper: Akhter, H., & Alam, Md. M. R. (2019). Understanding the Trends of Maternal and Neonatal Mor- tality in Bangladesh in the Context of South Asia. Advances in Anthropology, 9, 56-69. https://doi.org/10.4236/aa.2019.91004 Received: November 10, 2018 Accepted: January 19, 2019 Published: January 22, 2019 Copyright © 2019 by author(s) and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Open Access