Safer Motherhood. Supporting midwives in third world countries.

Image : Mother and son. from Teseum's photos on flickr.com








While I am busy trying to provide an opportunity for midwives to come together and collaborate, using second life, my thoughts go to midwives working in situations of poverty, in third world countries. These midwives and the women they are caring for need our support. Her is a link to a shocking statistic that I think will impact on anyone who sees it. At the time of writing this 89,365 women have died due to childbirth related causes in 2008 when you read it it will have ticked up even more.

The midwives who are struggling to provide care and support to women in these situations must find the whole situation so emotionally draining. I just cannot imagine it. One such midwife is an amazing young woman who has made her home in Malawi. It is this blog posting that made me think of this in the first instance. Many of her postings bring tears to my eyes and I admire her hugely. I was going to suggest she might find some support by connecting with other midwives, perhaps through this virtual environment and then I think about the challenges that she faces on a daily basis. Would this provide her with support or appear shallow and futile? Can collaboration in this way do anything to support midwives and women in these environments? Would she even be able to find the resources to do this. Clearly she does have internet access at least from time to time as she blogs.
What about midwives working in war torn areas of the world, Iraq, Afghanistan, what could we possibly do for them. Or the poverty stricken areas of South America or Asia. I was also moved byt the trailer for this movie Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids.
I would love to help and support these people in some way.

Here is one young mothers story


Just wanted to add a little to this post. I was chatting with a fellow midwife here recently and we were talking about the dreadfully high caesarean section rate in parts of South America. This midwife had spoken with someone who told her that women in the location he came from choose elective caesarean a little before the due date as they do not want to have to travel to the hospital in the middle of the night when they could be hijacked shot and/or robbed. Elective ceasarean is by far the safer option. It does put another perspective on the situation doesn't it?

Formula for disaster WHO Code violations in the Philipines

This is a 5 part documentary on you tube. I am only posting the first two here. I encourage you to go and view them all.
In New Zealand we may not have the level of poverty apparent here but we do have young women who have great difficulty affording formula. Babies need to have breast milk (or a breast milk substitute) for the whole first year of life. How many women feeding formula continue it for a whole year?
Our baby friendly hospital initiative is being looked at again. We MUST STAY STRONG. We cannot rely on formula companies to comply with the code. We must keep advertising of infant formula and samples out of our hospitals and away from health care professionals. When women absolutely must have formula for some reason we can tell them how to do this without brand promotion. We must not do the job for Wyeth or Nestle, they do a good enough job themselves. We must stay vigilant. this is absolutely shocking, disgraceful and a crime against humanity for the for the profit of corporations.

If you want mor information on this issue or want to know what you can do about it here is a link to Baby Milk Action

Information for mothers and would be mothers

Are you worried and confused about birth? The Childbirth Connection web site offers really good unbiased evidence based information to help you to get a better understanding of some of the things that might be confusing you. They have produced a booklet, which is free online entitled "What every woman needs to know about cesarean section". You have to register with the site to be able to download but registration does not cost you anything and does not seem to come with any extras that you might not want. Well worth having a look. Whether you are planning to have a cesarean section or not this is important information that you do need to know.

Safe Motherhood

Safe Motherhood
Originally uploaded by Christian Lagat

The Lancet medical journal is devoting its current issue to the safe motherhood initiative, which is 'celebrating' its 20th anniversary. There are several excellent articles in this issue on the topic of childbirth. It also has podcasts. The articles and podcasts are free. They are well worth checking out. Sadly it seems that there is now acknowledgment that the global initiative, of the World Health organisation and United Nations, to reduce maternal mortality by 75% by 2015 is unlikely to be reached. It seems that there is a lack of effort by societies and governments to make this happen.
You can get access to the Lancet through free registration. Some issues have free open access articles. I have this in my RSS feed and just check to see if there is anything of interest to me before I open it.