Unravelling the conundrums of social autopsy for maternal mortality in low- and middle-income countries.

Any meaningful effort to tackle maternal mortality in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) needs to be founded on a robust understanding of its causes. In LMICs, verbal autopsies are used to determine the clinical causes of death through interviews with the deceased person’s next-of-kin or caregivers. In addition, social autopsies have been conducted to allow capture of the story behind the death, enabling a comprehensive understanding of the socio-cultural, behavioural, and health system factors that contributed to the death [1,2]. However, researchers implementing social autopsies in LMICs are faced with some conun�drums. In this opinion, we discuss three key conundrums and propose a way forward for the field