Originally published on HuffingtonPost.com on May 3, 2011

I love being an American mom, but guess what, being a mom is even better for women in 30 other countries around the world.  In the world’s best place to be a mother, I could expect an extra year of life and I would have enjoyed a year of paid maternity leave after the birth of my children.  My own daughter would be expected to complete an extra year of school — for a total of 18.

What is the top-ranked country I’m talking about, where 40 percent of national elected officials are women (as compared to 17 percent here) and maternal and child mortality rates are among the very lowest in the world?

If you guessed it’s somewhere in Scandinavia, you’d be right.  According to the State of the World’s Mothers 2011 report, released today by Save the Children, Norway ranks as the world’s best place to be a mother.

On the other hand, in the world’s toughest place to be a mother, I would be far better off than the typical mother there.  Frankly, there’s a good chance I’d be dead.   I’ve already outlived this particular country’s female life expectancy of 45.  And as the mother of four, it’s very likely that one of my kids would have died from a preventable cause, like pneumonia or diarrhea.  One in five children there dies before turning five.

In this bottom-ranked country, girls only complete an average of five years of school, and access to the most basic health care is extremely limited.   Imagine giving birth alone or with only a neighbor or relative at your side.  In the country I’m talking about, 86 percent of mothers deliver this way.  As a result, pregnancy complications kill one of every 11 women.

Any guesses where this country might be?  Eight of the 10 worst places to be a mother in the rankings are in Africa, but not this one.  It’s a country that’s been at war for almost a decade, and civilian casualties are rising.   Even so, women in this country — Afghanistan — are 200 times more likely to die during childbirth than from bombs or bullets.

Here’s a snapshot of the 2011 rankings of 164 countries analyzed in the Mother’s Index:

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