Women Deliver to take on maternal deaths
In sub-Saharan Africa, one in every 16 women will die in pregnancy or childbirth. In Afghanistan and Sierra Leone, pregnancy and birth complications kill one in every six women. To take on the millions of maternal deaths worldwide, the UN is backing a landmark global conference set to take place in London this October.
At Women Deliver, more than 2,000 people will come together to strategize new ways to save women's lives and tackle other issues that impede women's access to care, such as poverty.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Women Deliver to take on maternal deaths.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.feministing.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.fcgi/5812
Weekly Feministing Newsletter
Feministing RSS Feed
Ooh! I know! Sex education and contraceptives, so the women who don't want to end up pregnant don't!
It's not just contreceptives and sex ed. This kind of discussion should also take into acocunt prenatal care and how substandard it is in many countries.
When doctors can get degrees by paying for them, and when facilities are so "basic" that women give birth in filthy facilities, where there is no consideration for her health, it becomes a crisis.
I had a friend once that was told by her doctor that she would give birth to a boy because she conceived in July. When you have these uneducated crackpots "caring" for women at a time that is so critical for them healthwise, of course women are going to die.
Not to mention post-delivery and infant/child care. Women dying in childbirth is a problem, but so is the chilluns dying after they're born.
what needs to be done is the training of village midwives. Many traditions would have had such a person in their community or settlement. However in war-torn, poverty-stricken parts of the world, these women are few and far between and women are having to deliver their babies themselves. Having access to clean water, towels and comfortable shelter would go a long way to ensuring some common causes of death in childbirth are avoided.
"Ooh! I know! Sex education and contraceptives, so the women who don't want to end up pregnant don't!"
Birth control in general, not just contraceptives...
"Not to mention post-delivery and infant/child care. Women dying in childbirth is a problem, but so is the chilluns dying after they're born."
...and don't forget the chilluns dying in childbirth.
Don't forget preteen and teen girls who got pregnant because their marriage-arranging families didn't allow them to even use abstinence let alone use the pill or IUDs. Then there are the women and girls whose families did let them use abstinence but still got pregnant and died in childbirth because other people raped them.