Cuba is considered a "third world" country, with limited economic resources. But as a result of policy priorities evident from the early days of the 1959 revolution, maternal mortality, along with a wide range of other health crises, have been reduced to "first world" levels: in 1996 at 2.4 per 10,000 births, barely above North American rates.
For most Western women, feminism is in large part a fight against the circumscribing of a woman's opportunities by her reproductive role; many who are engaged in that struggle have therefore been reluctant to take on an issue which seems to centre on women as mothers rather than women as women.