Northern Ireland is struggling towards ensuring that women have choice with respect to their reproductive potential. However it does have something to offer pregnant women that is enviable and admirable.
According to the United Nations, a woman’s chance of dying in childbirth in the United States is 1 in 4,800. In Ireland, which has the best rate in the world, it is 1 in 48,000. In Sierra Leone, it is 1 in 8.
One in eight. Think of eight women you know that are pregnant or who have recently given birth. Name each one out loud. Imagine one of them dying while giving birth. Perhaps a friend, a relative, a neighbour or someone very close to you almost died, but with the intervention of prompt, efficient professional health care workers, she survived and so did her infant.
Fatmata Jalloh’s body lay on a rusting metal gurney in a damp hospital ward, a scrap of paper with her name and “R.I.P.” taped to her stomach. In the soft light of a single candle — the power was out again in one of Africa’s poorest cities — Jalloh looked like a sleeping teenager. Dead just 15 minutes, the 18-year-old’s face was round and serene, with freckles around her closed eyes and her full lips frozen in a sad pucker. …More than 500,000 women a year — about one every minute — die in childbirth across the globe, almost exclusively in the developing world, and almost always from causes preventable with basic medical care. The planet’s worst rates are in this startlingly poor nation on West Africa’s Atlantic coast, where a decade of civil war that ended in 2002 deepened chronic deprivation.
The women die from bleeding, infection, obstructed labor and preeclampsia, or pregnancy-induced high blood pressure. But often the underlying cause is simply life in poor countries: Governments don’t provide enough decent hospitals or doctors; families can’t afford medications.
In Canada, the maternal death rate is 1 in 11,000 pregnancies carried to term.
1 in 8! That is criminal.