A S I A
Motherhood a Risk for Burmese Migrants
by Marwaan Macan-Markar
MAE SOT, Thailand — When she heads to the only health clinic in this border town where Burmese migrant workers feel welcome, Khin Soe Yee runs the risk of being arrested.
She had a close call one recent Saturday, when the Thai police stopped her and her husband on their way to the Mae Tao clinic. What saved them were the cries of their 10-month old son that needed medical attention, says the 32-year-old Soe Yee.
But this was just momentary relief for this mother of two children, who has been arrested on four previous occasions while heading for the clinic. During all four times, the couple were taken into police custody and kept in a cell for a day before being released.
"There is so much fear we have when coming to the clinic," says Soe Yee, a woman with a gaunt face with sunken cheeks. "There is no choice for us but to take this risk, especially for women like me, mothers."
What lies behind this price she has to pay for motherhood is her status in Thailand. She is an undocumented migrant, who slipped across the border from Burma three years ago and has been a farm worker ever since, picking potatoes, mushrooms and tomatoes. Her daily wage is 60 baht (1.50 U.S. dollars).
This town has an estimated 100,000 Burmese like Soe Yee, who have fled their military-ruled country in search of a job — any job — in Mae Sot, an area ringed by forest-covered hills on the Thai-Burma border.
Currently, there are an estimated one million migrant workers from Burma, more than half of whom are undocumented migrants, spread across Thailand. They are employed in labour intensive and unskilled work that labour rights activists call "dirty and dangerous" because locals do not want them.
For Dr Cynthia Maung, who runs the Mae Tao clinic, the travails women like Soe Yee face are part of a more complex reality that she and her 150-member staff have to encounter in caring for the many female migrant workers who come calling.
Last year, this clinic, which is made up of a few single-storey buildings that line a gravel path on the outskirts of this small town, saw an estimated 35,000 cases, a marked increase from the 2,000 cases it attended to when it opened, in 1989.
During the first half of this year, for instance, the clinic assisted 1,441pregnant women, of which 338 — or 23 percent — were teenage pregnancies, states a study on reproductive health at the Mae Tao clinic.
In addition, there were 1,231 patients who came for antenatal care who tested for sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, the study adds.
Further, the study notes that over 10 percent of the women who gave birth delivered babies with low weight of less than 2.5 kilogrammes.
Likewise, "the abortion rate is increasing, particularly unsafe abortions," Maung, a migrant herself from Burma, told IPS. "When you look at the reproductive health admissions to the clinic, you see that there are 30 post-abortion care cases per 100 deliveries."
What some women may take for granted in the modern cities of the world — emergency obstetrical care — is very much a rarity for the migrant workers, with only four percent of pregnant women having access to it.
"The reproductive health situation for migrant workers is not a happy one," says Than Than Aye of Social Action for Women (SAW), a Mae Sot-based non-governmental organisation (NGO). "There is little awareness about family planning, about sexual health issues and diseases like HIV."
That is compounded by cultural attitudes, economic realities, the working conditions in the garment factories that have attracted thousands of women, and the political climate they live in.
As regards condom use, for instance, health workers like Than Aye have found that migrant women feel inhibited in using condoms because "they are shy" — they fear being ridiculed by their peers.
Besides that, she adds, they are still influenced by what happens in Burma, where if "a woman is caught with a condom, she can be arrested on the grounds she is a prostitute".
Furthermore, both women's rights and health workers admit during interviews that the migrant workers have limited access to free condoms. Purchasing condoms would mean losing over half a day's average wage, which ranges between 60 baht (1.50 U.S. dollars) to 80 (2 dollars).
But Burmese labour rights activists like Moe Swe argue that there are other factors besides low condom use that have contributed to both an increase in abortion rates and related reproductive health concerns.
"The factories in Mae Sot do not like the migrant workers they have hired to get pregnant," Swe, secretary of Yaung Chi Oo Workers Association, said in an interview. "In July, 20 pregnant women were fired from a knitting factory because they were pregnant."
"The female workers are not entitled to maternal leave, to breastfeed their babies," he adds. "Most women also want to get back to work soon due to the money they desperately need. They often return after a month from delivering their babies."
To that can be added the confined lives that the thousands of women working in the many garment factories have to live. The employers force the workers to live in the factories, where services for health care are insufficient, reveals Swe.
According to Than Aye, the atmosphere migrant workers live in has also contributed to unwanted pregnancies, abandoned children and hundreds of "stateless children".
"At the safehouse run by SAW, we have 12 children who were abandoned by their parents, illegal migrants," she says. "They range from a 10-day-old baby to a two-and-a-half-year-old child."
Since July, she adds, over 700 children born to Burmese migrant workers in this region have been accounted for as being stateless, since Thai law does not recognise them as citizens.
"There are many restrictions that the workers face, including long hours," says Maung. "Attempts to change this are difficult, because it is not easy to send medical teams into the factories to deal with reproductive health concerns."
