Thursday, March 19, 2009

Dying to Give Life

Today on Women's eNews Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem writes a commentary on his sister's death called "Mothers Should Not Die Giving Life."

http://womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/3955

Though she was a well-educated woman, teaching science in a high school, she died in a small clinic in Nigeria after giving birth. The clinic did not have competent staff to attend to a post-partum emergency.

About 500,000 women die per year in events associated with pregnancy and childbirth.

"It's the No. 1 killer of women of childbearing age in the developing world," writes Abdul-Raheem. "The risk of a woman dying as the result of pregnancy in a developed country is 1 in 7,300. In Africa, it is 1 in 26."

See the report of Ann Starrs in Oct. 2007:

The U.S. Agency for International Development estimated in 2001 that the global economic impact of maternal and newborn mortality was $15 billion a year in lost potential production, half associated with the deaths of women and half with newborns.

Other studies by the World Health Organization have estimated that preventing nearly all those deaths would cost only about a third as much, or $4 billion to $6 billion in international development aid to the 75 countries where 95 percent of maternal and newborn deaths occur. That's only 2 percent of current aid levels, well within the grasp of donor countries.

http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/3352

No. 5 of the Millennium Development Goals is to reduce such deaths by three-quarters.

There will be a live chat on these issues on March 25 at 10 am EST, organized by Women's eNews and the UN Millennium Campaign.

If you can't chat, pray--March 25 is also a World Day of Prayer for women's ordination (
http://www.womensordination.org/ ). Let's pray for women to survive pregnancy as well as to gain the right to be priests.

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