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We live in the 21st century, we’ve sent humans to the moon and still every minute a women dies as a result of pregnancy. This video by the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood highlights how a lot of these deaths could be prevented - simply by providing the much needed medical assistance. In the developed world a women is more likely to die in a plane crash, than in childbirth. We’re accustomed to births happening in hospitals, with sterile equipment and in the presence of doctors and midwives wearing clean hospital uniforms. I mean, there’s even a growing movement in America and Europe calling for “demedicalizing birth”!
All this makes the thought that millions of women give birth without ANY assistance almost unbelievable. And sometimes there’s a happy ending to an unattended birth - a healthy mother and baby. But too often their life is in danger, and this movie shows the multitude of reasons why women still don’t get medical assistance even when it’s a matter of life and death.
A lot of times the closest hospital is too far away. Cars are expensive but lack of means of transport to hospital are one of the reasons mothers and their babies die. Villagers in Pitala, Malawi (Southeast Africa) came up with the idea of bicycle ambulances - simple, cost-effective, and it works. Villagers in Pitala are lucky - the hospital is close enough for a bike-ride to be feasible. In a lot of places the closest hospital will be days away.
Sometimes the mother is hemorrhaging and losing a lot of blood - 1 in 4 women who die in childbirth die because of excessive bleeding. Something that almost never happens in the ‘global North’ because there’s a pill, available in every hospital, which can quickly stop the bleeding - Misopostol. It’s a low cost (less than US$2), off-patent, easy to administer drug with few side-effects, which dispensed by a trained birth attendant saves lives. It sounds simple (and it is), but a trained birth attendant with adequate supplies needs to be present. However, globally we are currently lacking 4.3 million health workers - that’s a New Zealand or Croatia worth of doctors, nurses and midwives the world really badly needs to keep women from dying while bringing life into the world!
Lastly, and maybe in some ways most tragically, women all too often die because their families are not willing to pay for their treatment, even when it’s as little as US$3.45. There are still frighteningly many countries, where girls and women are not valued equally to their fathers, brothers and husbands and their health isn’t a priority. This shows that for progress on MDG5 we also need to work towards gender equality - which we've written about recently through the stories of Jess, Exildah and Kakenya.
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