Haiti's maternal mortality rate soars

Image: Part of Pulitzer Prize Winner Patrick Farrell of The Miami Herald's work during the humanitarian disaster in Haiti after Hurricane Ike Photo Gallery.

A woman experiencing pain moments after delivering her baby lifts herself off the table to head outside for recovery, so another woman can lay down and give birth at a clinic just outside Port-au-Prince, Haiti.


From the article:
"Haiti's maternal mortality rate soars"
16 March 2009
By JONATHAN M. KATZ | The Associated Press

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - The pain was different from before -- deeper, sharper. Everyone else was sleeping in the banana grove shack, but Yslande Aristide could not bear it. She stood on the dirt floor and started to scream.

In rushed her sisters with candles and water. Then came the midwife, who made tea from a leaf called ti-zan and told the howling 23-year-old to drink it.

Then she looked under her patient and saw the baby's foot. Aristide's fifth child was breech, a life-threatening birth position that under normal medical care would require a Cesarean section.

Late at night, with no money to reach the nearest hospital, the midwife frantically tried to get the baby out by smacking Aristide in the rear.

Giving birth is dangerous business for Haiti's poor, who suffer the highest maternal mortality rate in the Western Hemisphere. Some 630 of every 100,000 women died of pregnancy-related causes in 2006 -- more than five times the Latin American and Caribbean average, according to the United Nations.

"The maternal mortality rate in Haiti is embarrassing to the Western world ... these are preventable deaths," said Dr. Wendy Lai, an emergency obstetrician with Doctors Without Borders Holland.

The problem is heartbreakingly simple: Millions of women either cannot access health care, or cannot afford it.

Interested? Finish reading the article here.

Want to help improve maternal health for the poor?

• Birthing Kit Foundation is a voluntary, not for profit NGO that provides birthing kits and education in clean birthing practices to women who give birth at home in remote regions of the developing world.
  
• Alola Foundation aims to improve the maternal health of our close neighbours in East Timor. (Did you know Timorese women are ten times more likely than Australian women to die in childbirth?)
• International Women's Development Agency aims at improving gender equality and women's reproductive health
  

On the floor

(ARIANA CUBILLOS, ASSOCIATED PRESS / March 5, 2009)

Severin Carole, 31, gives birth on a mattress on the floor at the maternity ward of Cite Soleil's hospital in Port-au-Prince, Wednesday, March 4, 2009.

A new life
(ARIANA CUBILLOS, ASSOCIATED PRESS / March 5, 2009)

A nurse holds a new born baby, who was born on a mattress on the floor, at the maternity ward of Cite Soleil's hospital in Port-au-Prince, Wednesday, March 4, 2009.