All Articles Tagged "maternal health"
How Sierra Leone Improved Maternal and Child Health
(New York Times) — The paramedic’s eyes were bloodshot, his features drawn. Pregnant women jammed into the darkened concrete bunker, just as they had yesterday and would tomorrow. The increase in patients had been fivefold, or tenfold. The exhausted paramedic had lost count in a blur of uninterrupted examinations and deliveries. The word was out: it was no longer necessary to give birth at home and risk losing a baby or dying in childbirth. Hadiatou Kamara, 18, waited in the crowd. She had already lost a baby boy and girl. “They both died,” she said quietly. Now, for her third pregnancy, she was at this rural health clinic outside Freetown, the capital. The Sierra Leone government has eliminated fees for pregnant women and children, and Ms. Kamara, like thousands of women in a country where surgery has been performed by the light of cellphones and flashlights, could afford trained medical staff to oversee her pregnancy for the first time. At the Waterloo Community Health Center here, the women were spilling out the door, as they have consistently since the fees were lifted last year.
Black Maternal Mortality on Rise in NY
(Amsterdam News) — New York City is one of the most fatal cities in the United States for a woman to have a baby. That’s the indication from the most recent data on maternal mortality here, which show Black women are nearly eight times more likely to die during pregnancy or right after childbirth than white mothers. In 2008, Black women in New York City experienced 79 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, compared to 10 white maternal deaths per 100,000 live births and a national rate of 13 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, according to the latest data available.
The rate of maternal deaths among Black women in New York City has increased annually since 2004, when the city reached a low of 44 Black maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. That’s all according to vital statistics released by the city in January. “If I were mayor, I’d be saying, ‘This is a priority,’” said Maureen P. Corry, executive director of Childbirth Connection, a New York-based agency working to improve maternal health through research, advocacy and policy. “This needs urgent attention. What is happening to women in our city?”
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg began the year with the upbeat news that the average New Yorker’s life span had increased by five months to 79.4 years, a historic high. At the same time, the city extolled the success of city agencies in reducing smoking and infant mortality, helping to make New York one of the healthiest cities in the United States. While not specifically mentioning mothers, Bloomberg did acknowledge that the need to reduce preventable deaths and health disparities in the city persists.
