India’s invisible mothers

By Shabana Azmi, acclaimed actress and activist and EVERY ONE campaign ambassador

It is a little known fact that Mumtaz Mahal, Moghul Emperor Shah Jahan’s favorite queen died due to complications related to repeated childbirth. The Taj Mahal for all its beauty is a grim reminder of the fact that even today there are thousands of women in the country who continue to die during childbirth.

How many of us note the grimness against the picturesque beauty. Even after 400 years we seem to done little to improve the health of the mothers in our country.

India is a country that lives in several centuries simultaneously and so it is with maternal health.

If statistics are anything to go by - the Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR) in India is 254 to 100,000 – ranging from 95 in Kerala to 480 in Assam. To make sense of these statistics we have more 68000 women in our country dying every year in childbirth which is to say that in India every eight minutes a women dies while giving birth.

On the one hand, we find that India is marching into the 21st century with the head held high and becoming a global power and on the other hand, a new report from Save the Children says that india ranks number 73 on 77 of middle income countries when it comes to the ‘the best place to be a mother’. The Mother’s Index is based on analysis of indicators of women’s and children;s health and well being.

That is really a shocking state of affairs. The number of women we lose due to pregnancy related issues in one week in India is more than all of Europe in the whole year. . If I were to say it in different words, I will say that the number of women that we lose in one year in India due to pregnancy related issues is the same as having 400 air plane crashes.

Can you imagine what would happen? Governments would fall but because it is the poor rural women who are dying, nobody is paying any attention. Surely, this must change. Surely, we need to focus on giving our mothers the best healthcare possible and women need to be put on the frontline of the healthcare if this country is to make true progress.

We know that healthy mothers give birth to healthy children and we have a healthy family. We can neglect mothers at our own peril, at the peril of society. This state of affairs must change. It has been proved that when you have women accessing healthcare and particularly by training for instance dais, the midwives and more female health workers; their health definitely improves.

There is a critical role of female health workers in the fight to reduce maternal, newborn and child mortality. Evidence show that countries that train and deploy more front-line female health workers have seen dramatic declines in maternal, newborn and child mortality.

For instance our neighbours Nepal and Bangladesh have made remarkable progress. Deployment of 50,000 Female Community Health Volunteers has helped Nepal cut maternal deaths by half in 20 years and be on track to meet the U.N. Millennium Development Goal 4 of reducing childhood mortality by two thirds by 2015.

Bangladesh has already cut under-5 mortality by 64 per cent since 1990, and is also on track to meet the goal of reducing child deaths by two-thirds. Female fieldworkers who make home visits have played a critical role in delivering family planning services and reducing the number of high-risk pregnancies in Bangladesh. In another project, supported by Save the Children, home visits by female community health workers offering prenatal and postnatal care reduced newborn deaths by 34 percent in targeted rural communities.

On another note this cannot be dubbed as a health issue alone, we also need to invest in education of girls because there is a definite link between status of women, literacy levels and health. So we need to invest in our girl children and we need a commitment to our mothers because that is the only way our country can move forward in real terms.

What is shocking is that we can often become numb to large numbers and worse still sidelined as ‘women’s issue’. It ends up as nobody’s concern. Who’s agenda should it be – women’s, family’s, or society as a whole? EVERY ONE’s Women cannot wait.

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