The maternal health development policy in Indonesia has begun since 1955 through the BKIA program to the ratification of MDG's policies in 2000 and SDG's in 2015, but the maternal mortality rate is still sharply up and down with high disparities between regions in Indonesia. The policy failed to reach MDG's target with 102 maternal deaths in 2015 because the death of Indonesian mothers was still at number 349 (Working Paper of the Ministry of Health, 2015). This fact makes the target of SDGs in 2030 to reduce maternal mortality rates to 70 should be doubted. A series of systematic reviews of literature between 2003-2015 included 115 countries from 23 research units eligible including 417 data packages, reporting 60,799 cases of maternal deaths with 73% clinical causes of death and 25% non-clinical deaths. currently Indonesia still has the highest maternal mortality rate of 349 compared to Malaysia and Vietnam 160, Philippines 112, Brunei 33 and Singapore 6 (World Health and Unicef ​​2012), (Lale Say 2014), (Berer Marge 1999; Amowitz Lynn L 2002; Patwardhan M 2016).

This paper aims to understand and systematically evaluate how the socio-cultural context contributes to the implementation of maternal health development policies since 1950 - 2015 in Indonesia; failure to achieve the goal of reducing maternal mortality cannot be separated from the socio-cultural context and assessing what socio-cultural opportunities are available in the community to support the mission of reducing maternal mortality in Indonesia.