Maternal mortality: Why it's a crisis
By: Geoffrey York
Globe and Mail
January 29, 2010
The villagers hoisted the pregnant woman onto their shoulders, carrying her in a crude stretcher made from a blanket and two sticks, and began trudging down the path to the nearest town.
The woman, 24-year-old Setew Tilahun, had gone into labour the night before. But the baby was twisted around inside her and could not come out. Nobody in her remote Ethiopian village could help her. And so her arduous journey began.
When the villagers finally reached the nearest town, late at night, after carrying her on their shoulders for six hours, the people at the health centre said they could do nothing for her. They found an ambulance and sent her on to the next town, a four-hour drive.
At 2 a.m., medical staff in the town of Fitche looked at her and said they couldn't help either. They put her back on the road again. At 4 a.m., she finally reached a hospital in the capital, Addis Ababa, where doctors found that her baby had died.
The mother, too, was barely alive, and needed emergency treatment to save her life. “She looked like a dead woman,” says her brother, Getachew Mesaye, a 27-year-old farmer. “She fainted and it took two hours to revive her.”
It was the kind of small human tragedy that happens every day, all over the world. Close to 550,000 women die in pregnancy and childbirth every year – a rate of about one woman every minute – along with nearly 4 million infants who die within a month of birth. The grim statistics reflect one of the most stubbornly intractable and neglected crises in the world, which persists despite endless studies and debates and vague promises of help.
For women in Africa and Asia, the act of giving life – having a child – is one of the most dangerous risks they can take. Their chances of dying in childbirth can be more than 100 times greater than a Canadian or American woman would face.
This week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper became the latest in a string of politicians to pledge action. He promised that maternal and child health would be Canada's “top priority” at the G8 summit in June.
Read Geoffrey York’s entire article here.
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