The death of mothers is not just a women’s issue

From Thursday's Globe and Mail
Published on Wednesday, Sep. 15, 2010 3:45PM EDT

A woman dies almost every minute in childbirth, mostly in the developing world, and if I were not fortunate enough to live in Canada, I might have been one of those statistics.

My first child was a breech birth, my second child too big for me to deliver. If my doctor had not performed cesarean sections, there is no telling what could have happened to me and my babies.

I carry that thought with me every day, because now that I am a mother, everything is heartbreakingly personal: Every dead child could have been mine and every dead mother could have been me.

While that sometimes leaves me emotionally drained after reading the newspaper or watching the news on television, the constant reminder of my luck in being born a Canadian with access to exceptional care is galvanizing. It keeps me focused on the mothers throughout the world who endure horrifying labours without skilled birthing attendants, crippling backroom abortions or c-sections without any access to pain control, or the ones who die and the shattered families they leave behind.

It also gives me cause to celebrate small achievements such as the incrementally declining maternal death rates, which are proof that advocacy and hard work can have an impact.

But there is still so much work to be done. On Monday, I will be in New York with my mother, Maureen McTeer, to attend the Women: Inspiration and Enterprise symposium hosted by the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood, of which mom is the Canadian representative. Hosted by Sarah Brown, the alliance’s Global Patron and the wife of former British prime minister Gordon Brown, Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, and fashion designer Donna Karan, the symposium will highlight the issues of maternal/child health as world leaders gather to reaffirm their somewhat tepid commitment to United Nations Millennium Development Goal 5, which calls for universal access to reproductive health by 2015.

A conference like this, and any similar initiative, is useful if it helps to prevent even one of the estimated 536,000 deaths (2005) of women a year from pregnancy-related causes or keep one woman alive for the one million children who are left motherless.

One of the main obstacles we have to overcome in this birth-and-death struggle is the view that this is merely a women’s issue. It is not. It is a global issue and it affects every person. Do we all not have a responsibility to protect the legacies of our mothers and the futures of our sisters and daughters? My daughter is 4 and currently wants to be a cowgirl and an astronaut. Dying in childbirth is not something I ever intend for her to contemplate.

To be more hard-hearted about this, the financial impact of maternal deaths is as shocking as the loss of life.

About $15.5-billion in potential productivity vanishes each year when mothers and their newborns die, or are left with long-term injuries, after birth or botched abortions. Mothers also perform countless hours of unpaid work as caregivers, teachers, health-care practitioners and chief executives all rolled into one, so when the mother dies, the family engine stops running and the broader community must step in to care for those left behind.

It is a tragedy if a woman dies in childbirth in Canada. It is just a sad, normal event if it happens in the developing world. That continued acceptance of the deaths of women is what we must change. I urge you to make a difference – through a donation, through advocacy, through pressing our political leaders to support fully Millennium Development Goal 5. Because, to quote the UN Population Fund, “no woman should die giving life.”

Catherine Clark is a writer and host of the national political television show Beyond Politics on CPAC.