This Sunday is Mother’s Day, a wonderful excuse to shower presents, praise and love on the woman who carried you into the big, wide world.
Tomorrow, May 5, is another special day for mothers, daughters and women – International Day of the Midwife – which, while being a celebration, is also a time to reflect on the global inequalities surrounding maternal and newborn mortality.
Here in Australia, we have free healthcare, full-equipped hospitals and a low infant mortality rate. Even so, giving birth is traumatic enough! So imagine what it’s like for the 60 million women in developing countries who give birth every year with the assistance of a traditional birth attendant or with no assistance at all, in appalling, unhygienic conditions, often on the dirt floor of a hut. For these women, giving birth is a seriously high-risk activity, reflected by United Nations estimates that more than half a million women die in childbirth each year, 99 per cent of them in developing countries. For every woman who dies, another 30 emerge from the experience with infections and lifelong injuries that cause pain, embarrassment or leave them disabled. This is far more than a health issue. It’s a human rights failure, and as the journal Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology notes: “Women are not dying because of untreatable diseases. They are dying because societies have yet to make the decision that their lives are worth saving.”
For the past five years, Australia’s Birthing Kit Foundation has been playing a small yet significant role in helping reduce these shocking statistics. All around the country, ordinary people are donating a few hours to come together for “assembly days”, where birthing kits are assembled. There’s not a lot in the small zip-lock bags, just the minimum that a mother needs to give birth: soap and surgical gloves; a plastic sheet so they have a clean surface to lie on; a sterile scalpel for cutting the umbilical cord; a piece of string to tie it with; and sterile gauze to clean the baby’s eyes. Of course, kits are no substitute for what women really need – prenatal care, trained midwives, doctors and emergency obstetric care. However, the whole kit, which costs a mere $2, goes someway towards reducing haemorrhaging after birth as well as the incidence of neonatal tetanus. The gloves also mean birthing attendants can assist mothers without fear of catching HIV/AIDS.
Since 2006, more than 27,000 Australians have participated in assembly days. Over 600,000 kits have gone out to 30 countries in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, where training is also given on how to use them. Women in rural areas, where hospitals are far and resources scarce, are particularly grateful for the kits. Feedback from Afghanistan on the kits’ effectiveness found that of 2350 births using the kits, only one woman died and all babies survived. Without the kits, those statistics would be more in the ballpark of between 44 and 118 women dying along with 100 babies.
It’s hard not to be moved by the power of a piece of string and a tiny kit which costs less than your morning latte.
If you’re still deliberating on what to gift your mum this Mother’s Day, why not give a donation in her name to the
Birthing Kit Foundation? In return, she’ll receive a gorgeous gift card with a personal, hand-written message – and the knowledge that she’s made life a whole lot more possible for another mother and her child somewhere out there in the big, wide world.
Janine Israel is madison's deputy chief sub-editor.