mojatu .com
26 Faith & Spirituality
WOMANSLAUGHTER
The tragedy of maternal mortality in the 21 st century
Picture the following scenes….
It’s 1915 and in a home in the Welsh valleys, a woman
(let’s call her Hannah) goes into labour. Hannah and
her husband John have seven children, the youngest
is 3yrs old. When Hannah is six months pregnant
she goes into premature labour. Unlike her previous
deliveries, Hannah does not recover immediately. She
begins to bleed heavily and within 30mins, she is also
dead…the cause of death is Catastrophic Post-Partum
Haemorrhage.
Fast forward 100yrs….
It’s 2015 and a pregnant woman, also called Hannah,
arrives at a UK hospital. She quickly delivers a baby girl.
The mother is given a drug is called Oxytocin which
prevents excessive blood loss. However, she continues
to bleed more heavily than expected, so she is given
a second medication called Misoprostol. That plus a
blood transfusion, bring her body to a near normal
state. All is well and 24hrs later, mum and baby return
home.
At the same time….
A woman, goes into labour in a slum in Liberia’s capital.
Thankfully, she makes it to the local hospital and gives
birth to a baby girl. However, soon after birth she
starts bleeding. Neither the Oxytocin or Misoprostol
is available. Hannah dies 15minutes after giving birth.
The cause of death is documented as Catastrophic
Post-Partum Haemorrhage. The chances of the baby
dying before her 5 th birthday have increased tenfold
with the death of her mother.
Yet the medication which Hannah in Liberia should
have received is out there. In 2000, the UN launched
their Millennium Development Goals, a global strategy
for reducing global poverty by raising the standard
of living for the poorest on the planet to a basic level.
Millennium Development Goal number five was
to reduce maternal mortality by 75% by 2015. The
estimated number of women dying in pregnancy and
childbirth in 2000 was 550,000. If you add together the
number killed in the Asian tsunami with that of the
Haitian earthquake, the total doesn’t amount to the
number of women dying year on year from childbirth.
Furthermore, it is likely that this is an underestimation
because in remote rural areas, females are born, grow
up, get married, become pregnant and die without an
official record of such events.
Despite this, in 2012, the numbers of women dying
annually was revised to 287,000. However, the numbers
were not being reduced quickly enough to achieve
the Goal of 137,000. In 2015, the estimated number of
women dying annually was revised again to 303,000.
One third of that number is made up by two countries,
Nigeria with 58,000 deaths and India with 40,000
maternal deaths. Nigeria and India have extremes of
wealth and poverty. India has a space programme and
Nigeria has oil resources yet one third of the 300,000
women dying annually will have haemorrhaged to
death. A condition which can be remedied simply and
inexpensively.
So why are women dying in such numbers in the
21 st century when we have we have the most amazing
technology at our fingertips. We must ask ourselves
this question… ‘If men were dying is such numbers
every year, would something have been done about it?’
A speaker at a maternal health conference in Uganda in
2008, summed it up perfectly.
“Women are not dying of diseases we cannot treat; they
are dying because society has decided that they are not
worth treating.” Please read the following facts and see
if you agree with the above quote.
x 99% of maternal deaths occur in the developing
world.
x 99% of maternal deaths are avoidable
x Worldwide, pregnancy and childbirth are the biggest
killers of females between the ages of 15 and 29.
x In Chad, there is a saying “A woman who is pregnant
has one foot in the grave.”
x Losing these women costs the world more than it
would to save them. Women produce 70% of the
wealth in developing countries. That loss plus the