POPULATION: Safe Motherhood Targets Still Within Reach

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Oct 27 1997 (IPS) - Despite the massive cutback in funds worldwide, maternal mortality rates can be dramatically reversed with low-cost initiatives, a global conference on safe motherhood in the Sri Lankan capital has concluded.

An investment of just two dollars per person on maternal health could save the vast majority of the over one million women who die annually from pregnancy-related complications.

Research findings presented at the six-day meeting showed that all was not lost — 1998 could mark a turning point even without massive funding.

Last week, more than 200 participants from 65 countries reviewed the progress made by the ‘Safe Motherhood Initiative’ launched 10 years ago at a six-day meeting in Colombo that was organised by the U.K-based International Planned Parenthood Federation ( IPPF).

The post-conference statement said that 1998 has been declared the ‘Year of Safe Motherhood’ and in April a series of major gatherings in Washington will bring together business, government and expert leaders in a call to reduce the number of deaths asso ciated with pregnancy and child-birth.

“I can confidently say that we now know how to reduce the carnage of avoidable maternal deaths. We know these deaths are preventible because one percent of them occur in the developed world and 99 per cent in the developing world,” said Dr Fred Sai, a former IPPF president.

The conference has called upon governments to make safe motherhood a priority since access to care for mothers is a human right.

“Women shouldn’t die because they are women, and for doing God’s given duty of delivering a child. They should … they must be protected,” Dr Sai stressed.

“There is a self-interest here; national economies, communities and households are all highly dependant on women’s paid and unpaid labour,” according to Anne Tinker, health specialist at the World Bank.

Statistics show that around the world one woman dies every minute from pregnancy-related causes with 99 per cent of these occurring in developing countries. About 50 million more women are maimed for the same reason.

Over one in four births, or 40 million a year, develop complications which affect maternal and infant heath, studies show. Seven million newborns die annually as a result of maternal health problems while over 90 percent of infants who lose their mother in delivery will die by their first birthday

In Colombo, participants discussed a range of maternity services that should be offered in communities, at clinics and at hospitals. They also looked at, more broadly, at other reproductive health issues such as strategies for preventing unwanted pregnan cies, delaying marriage and first birth.

Figures compiled by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and Family Care International show that over 20 million women undergo unsafe abortions every year with approximately 70,000 dying as a result.

Millions more suffered from infection, haemorrhage, and other health conditions which can result in permanent conditions such as infertility and chronic pain, the joint study found. It said more than 100 million women in the world have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM) with an additional two million young wo men having this every every year.

For once the issue of abortion was freely discussed at the global conference, because ignoring it would be lethal, Dr Pramilla Senanayyake, chairwoman of the conference said.

“It is often tempting to avoid discussion of abortion because it is so contentious but this evasion carries a cost: in some countries, unsafe abortion accounts for 30-50 percent of maternal deaths,” she said.

The conference statement quoted Jill Sheffield, president of Family Care International, as saying that “having children remains so perilous in much of the world because the conventional tactics for making it safer do not actually save women.”

In the developing world, more than 25 percent develop short or long-term illnesses as a result of childbirth, experts say. “Up to a million women are living with a fistula; a hole in the birth canal that allows leakage from the bladder or rectum into th e vagina. Many of these women become homeless outcasts,” Senanayake was quoted saying.

In a speech that drew praise from most delegates, Dr Mahmoud Fatthala, senior advisor of the RockeFeller Foundation in Egypt, argued that advocates for women will be the conscience of society. “This must be near the top of the agenda of any group campai gning for a better place for women. … This is of course, also an issue for fathers and husbands and sons and brothers,” he noted.

Fatthala, also said that maternal mortality was not only about figures or statistics. “It’s about women; women who have faces; faces that show agony, despair. It is not right that these are all women who die in the prime of their lives,” he said.

In retrospect, he said, every maternal death is an event that should have been avoided and should never have happened.