Our Maternal Care Plea in UNFPA Blog

The UNFPA blog Conversations for a Better World has published our It Affects Us All: Maternal Health Care.

Action Alert: Pregnant Women & Unborn Babies in Haiti

Pregnant women and their babies are highly vulnerable to death and injury in disaster situations. Please give to Americans for UNFPA in its work to aid the pregnant women and babies of Haiti.

What Prolife Means

Pro Life Means Guaranteed Maternity Care for All

Foster Human-Friendly Prenatal & Childbirth Care Options

The Big Push for Midwives seeks to increase mother- and baby-friendly prenatal care and childbirth choices in the United States, where these choices remain scarce, especially for poor people & people of color.

The Big Push encourages good citizens to:
--Ask your Congresspeople to co-sponsor H.R. 2358/S. 1423, the Medicaid Birth Center Reimbursement Act.
--Ask then to include Certified Professional Midwives in Medicaid and any health care reform proposals.

You can contact your US Representatives and senators here.

Send a Safe Birthing Kit for $8

(crossposted at Marysia's RHReality Check diary)

If you have access to the Internet, chances are that even with the
global economic downturn, you are still, wherever you may live, prosperous compared to the average person and family in the Two-Thirds World.

Are you still able to spare $8? UMCOR, the United Methodist Committee on Relief, will send on your behalf a birthing kit to help protect and save the lives of one mother and one baby in a materially poor country.

(Note: UMCOR's relief work is something that I suspect people of all faiths and none could support--not all Christians use relief work as a pretense for prostelytizing by a long shot--but please check this out for yourself.)

Maternal and child mortality are interconnected global scourges. They are directly caused by the inhumane failure to make widely available even low-tech, inexpensive solutions like birthing kits or oral rehydration therapy to those who most desperately need them.

As UNFPA insists,"No Woman Should Die Giving Birth." Please visit this UNFPA site if you want to learn more about this unnecessary, preventable global injustice--and please be the solution for one mother and one baby through UMCOR.

Large institutional changes in health care are necessary to solve the problem on
a massive scale, but individuals and families in the present cry out for direct and immediate help, too.

Surely this is an area where prolife and prochoice can and should cooperate.

End "This Shameful Neglect" With the White Ribbon Alliance

Please endorse this plea for life just in from the White Ribbon Alliance. Thank you.

Dear Friend,

Tell the Global Leaders

... every woman has the right to health care in pregnancy and childbirth.

In September, the global leaders will attend an emergency United Nations meeting in New York on the Millennium Development Goals - the 8 goals world leaders set in 2000 to tackle poverty and global inequities.

Yet Millennium Development Goal 5, to reduce maternal deaths by 75% by the year 2015, is the one Goal on which virtually no progress has been made so far. Despite recent commitments by the African Union and the European Union to set milestones for skilled birth attendants and family planning, world leaders lack the political will to take decisive steps to reverse the trend of declining investment in maternal health. It is time to make our voices heard so that this shameful neglect of women and their newborns comes to an end.

It will take you two minutes to sign this letter - and in that time two women around the world will lose their lives during pregnancy or childbirth because they don't have access to basic health services. This action will demonstrate to the global leaders that the public will no longer accept this injustice.

http://www.whiteribbonalliance.org/takeaction

We are aiming to collect at least 500,000 signatures to represent the 500,000 women who die during pregnancy or childbirth each year -- we need your help! Please spread this message widely amongst your networks. We will continue reaching out for more ways to get involved in the campaign.

Please join us.

We look forward to hearing from you and continued collective efforts.

Best regards,
Betsy McCallon
Senior Program Advisor/Promise to Mothers Lost Project Manager
bmccallon@whiteribbonalliance.org
202-777-0933



Global Secretariat
One Thomas Circle NW, Suite 200 Washington, DC USA
tel: 202.775.9680 fax: 202.775.9694
wra1@whiteribbonalliance.org


Copyright (c) 2008 White Ribbon Alliance, All Rights Reserved

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Major Update to Our Directory

Under Help With Crisis Pregnancy and Beyond: Mother And Child Health (During and After Pregnancy), the Nonviolent Choice Directory lists the ministry of health, its equivalent, or other health authority for almost every country and territory on Earth.

We have just updated this list. Apologies to anyone who was inconvenienced, or worse, by our laggardness in doing so.

Please Sign Safe Motherhood Demands to the G8 Leaders

The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood is sponsoring this petition to the leaders of the upcoming G8 summit, the conference of the world's biggest economic powers.

Noting that one woman dies from unsafe motherhood *every minute*, the petition calls upon the summit leaders to:

--grant "an additional 10 billion dollars annually for maternal, newborn and child health."

--"increase the number of trained health workers by 4 million."

--"acknowledge that maternal mortality is one of the best indicators for judging the success of a health system."

Please sign! Lives are on the line!

Giving Life Shouldn't Cause Death

Release from the international White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood...Nonviolent Choice is a member organization. You can find a link to WRA on our Affiliations page.


White Ribbon Alliance Calls For International Monetary Fund and World Bank to Invest in Women's Health

Says Deadly Delays and Broken Promises Make Pregnancy and Childbirth #1 Killer of Women in World Today


Washington, DC - The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood today made public its appeals to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to drastically increase investments in women's health. Citing recent reports that the UN Millennium Development Goal to reduce maternal mortality by 75% by 2015 is unlikely to be met in Asia until 2076 and many years later in Africa, they challenged world leaders to
move from empty pledges to definitive action, underscoring that 99% of maternal deaths occur in developing nations and jeopardize progress to reduce infant mortality and combat HIV/AIDS and malaria.

"Maternal mortality is the single greatest health indicator of the failure of governments to meet the basic needs of society's poorest and most vulnerable women, said Theresa Shaver, White Ribbon Alliance Executive Director. "Whether in Bangladesh or the Bronx, where there is the political will to invest in health care systems to provide quality obstetric and emergency care, almost all women live through the complications that would otherwise kill them."

Experts estimate a package of maternal health services costing less than US$1.50 per person could make significant improvements in women's health in the 75 countries where 95% of maternal and child deaths occur.
(boldface ours--Marysia)

However, funding for population, family planning and reproductive health has declined since the mid-1990s, especially if HIV/AIDS money is excluded. Meanwhile, aid to the least developed countries has essentially stalled since 2003.

"Just as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank played a critical role catalyzing unprecedented investments in anti-retroviral therapy for more than two million people living with HIV/AIDS in Africa, we challenge them to prioritize investments in women's health to save mothers' lives now needlessly lost in these same countries," said Lennie Kamwendo, Chairperson of the White Ribbon Alliance in Malawi.

"Every minute another woman dies in childbirth," continued Shaver. "It is past time for the world's most powerful nations to meet their obligations with no less urgency than steps taken to fight the war on terrorism and secure stability of financial institutions. Not only is an investment in women's health one that reaps enormous economic benefits, it is the right thing to do."

The White Ribbon Alliance is leading a global campaign - A Promise to Mothers Lost: Healthy Pregnancy and Safe Childbirth for All - to hold world leaders to account for the tragedy of maternal mortality during the upcoming meetings of the World Economic Forum in South Africa, G8Summit in Japan and the UN Call to Action in New York.


For Immediate Release
Contact: Deborah Clark, Communications Director

April 11, 2008
White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood

debclark@promisetomothers.org, 202-679-2399

Endorse UNIFEM's "Say NO to Violence Against Women" Petition

UNIFEM, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, has launched a global petition, "Say NO to Violence Against Women."

As well as being a major, widespread human rights violation in and of itself, violence against women is a major cause of abortion worldwide. It often begins or escalates during pregnancy. Women may be outright and directly forced to abort their pregnancies, or be subjected to so many miseries, they cannot envision a different way.

And violence against women is a major reason why women are deprived of their right to make nonviolent choices, such as whether or not to have sex, and with whom, and whether or not to prevent conception, and how. Violence against women violates women's (as well as unborn children's right) to bodily integrity, and often violates women's (as well as unborn children's) right to life itself.

If you are a pregnant--or nonpregnant, for that matter--woman who has been or is subjected to violence, please visit our Mother & Child Health page(direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/motherchildhealth.html) . It lists sources of help for problems with Domestic Violence/Abuse (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/motherchildhealth.html#dv.html).

Our Pregnancy Prevention page (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/preventionallways.html)offers resources on Rape & Incest Treatment & Prevention (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/preventionallways.html#rape).

And of course, one of the deepest solutions for violence against women resides in greater Male Resonsibility (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/maleresponsibility.html).

Health Care for All US Residents!

I'm late with this, but...better late than never...although really I have no excuse, as a multiply health-impaired and often financially impaired US citizen. Well, come to think of it, my recent hospital stints, followed by much sorting through and weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over labyrinthine, obscurantist, yet all too clearly threatening!! piles of insurance paperwork, do account for some of the delay. Yeah, I know, I know, I'm the Lucky One, the one who does have coverage...Things could be worse---however---need they be this bad?

Michael Moore, director of the somehow hilarious (given the subject matter) "Sicko," has a list of simple but powerful action steps that US residents can take to stand up and be counted for nationwide health care.

Just Do It! And please put in a good word not simply for us sickos, but for pregnant women who can't get affordable prenatal, labor & delivery, or postpartum care, and that's just the beginning of their troubles.

In creating the Nonviolent Choice Directory's Mother Child Health Care Access by Country section (direct URL http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/motherchildhealth-careaccess.html), I have learned a lot of things about other nations' commitment to real (nonabortion) reproductive and other basic health care that simply put the US to shame...well beyond what Moore shows in the film.

Did you know, for example, that all women in Ecuador are entitled by statute to free maternity care? Ecuador, where per capita income is about $4500/year, as opposed to the US per capita of over $20,000/year. Is the difference so much in the money, or in the social priorities of the two countries?

If it's a gap in social priorities, my fellow Americans, let's learn how to close it. Quick. We of all peoples cannot plead that money is foreign to our shores. We just aren't spreading it about properly.

Worldwide Declines in Unborn & Already-Born Child Mortality

Some recent news:

--Global rates of birth-to-five child mortality are declining. (Press release on the forthcoming UNICEF State of the World's Child Report 2008)

--In the US, unborn child mortality from induced abortion in the US has dropped to its lowest rate since 1974. (Guttmacher Institute press release, January 17, 2008)

--This drop is apparently part of a bigger picture. According to an earlier Guttmacher report, "the number of induced abortions worldwide declined from nearly 46 million to under 42 million between 1995 and 2003." Hopefully there were fewer deaths and injuries of pregnant women, too.

It would be most unfortunate if these welcome stories became cause for complacency. The reasons for each of these declines need to be more fully understood and documented. They need to be made into amply funded action plans that refine or replace the ones in place now (if indeed they are in place now).

Better access to free or affordable reproductive health services, including but not limited to family planning, is one vital reason. The world's largest advocate and provider of reproductive health services is UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund.

Smear campaigns from contraception opponents have persistently depicted UNFPA as a ruthless promoter of abortions, including coerced abortions. The truth is markedly different.

UNFPA is not perfect, nor does it have a perfect history. But now its abundant work saves and improves born and unborn lives throughout the globe.

Please express gratitude to UNFPA by visiting its How You Can Help page. For example, USD $9 will supply one couple with contraceptives for two years; $20 will cover the costs of safe birthing kits for women in war or disaster situations.

Whatever you do, you will help to make those thankfully falling death rates fall even faster.

FAO Calls for Local Food Production to Stave Off Famine

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization demands immediate action to protect the Earth's poor from steep escalations in food prices.. FAO is zeroing in on the need to boost local food production in 37 countries.

Food security is part of the right to life, and it is essential to women's good reproductive health and the healthy prenatal and postnatal development of children. Yet so many of Earth's poor are subject to famine, despite the fact that (at least now, this could change) it is a matter of distribution, not availability.

Historically, too, this has been true of many famines. As a boy, Amartya Sen witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, which killed three million people. As part of his career as a Nobel Prize-winning economist, he researched the causes of this and other past Indian famines. He concluded that the problem was not so much lack of food, but overly high food prices and other preventable, addressable causes--meaning that millions of deaths were wholly unnecessary.

This gets personal for me, too. Some of my ancestors escaped An Gorta Mor, the Great Irish Hunger of the nineteenth century, which drove into exile or killed millions of human beings. Irishers will refer to 1847, the most deadly year of An Gorta Mor, as "Black '47" (that's what it's named for, the New York City band of Larry Kirwan and lawsuit-against-the-BBC-winnin' rapper Chris Byrne, aka Seanchai.)

The potato blight was but one cause of many. In fact, it was simply the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. The English colonizers forced the Irish to devote most of the land to export food, leaving very little land to grow their own food security. Even though political decolonization of the Two-Thirds World was at its height forty and fifty years ago, this economic scenario prevails today in so many impoverished, famine-threatened nations. Small wonder that so many Irishers, like the people of Concern Worldwide, are involved in hunger relief.

In other words, just as there was during these historical catastrophes--there's currently enough food and food production capacity to go around--the richer countries just don't have political or economic will, or enough of it, to ensure that poorer countries are not robbed of what is rightfully theirs. FAO is right to focus on local food production and security.

In part because I have a long memory...the Nonviolent Choice Directory offers numerous resources on Food & Nutrition (http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/foodnutrition.html if the link doesn't work) not only for people who wish to get involved in this issue, but for pregnant, breastfeeding, and other humans in need of emergency food assistance; for anyone interested in learning about and promoting the nutritional needs of mothers and children; for anyone interested in the eco-friendlier, often less expensive option of vegetarian diet; and for anyone interested in feasible, practical ways to grow their own food security.

A World AIDS Day Message on Maternal Child Health & Life

This just in from South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign, or TAC, a grassroots, nonviolent force for justice in the world's most heavily HIV-infected nation and a global inspiration:

As we approach World AIDS Day a key goal must be to improve maternal health and prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission (PMTCT).

On World AIDS Day 1999, I stood with hundreds of other people in Cape Town's Company Gardens for the first unveiling in that city of the AIDS Quilt. We were blessed and moved to hear TAC activists in courageous "I Am HIV Positive" T shirts speak up for their own lives and the lives of all HIV-affected people, and lament those who were already needlessly lost. One of them was a young mother who lost her baby simply because they had been denied access to antiretroviral drugs and other lifesaving care. As she spoke, she made cradling motions in the empty air.

Why should any mother have to suffer like this?
And why, on a related matter, should any pregnant, HIV positive woman anywhere in the world have to face the "choice" between abortion or ELSE?

South Africa's notoriously denialist government was and still is slow to alleviate the crisis all around it. It did not roll out its first PMTCT programs until 2003, and TAC still challenges and challenges it to do right by its own promises to its own citizens, in the area of PMTCT and so much else. 800 human beings still die from HIV/AIDS every day in South Africa. And unfortunately this is but a more dramatic and concentrated example of what is happening in all corners of the planet every day.

Please do not let the sheer numbers numb you out...Each of us has something to give to the struggle against the pandemic. Here are some ways.

--Learn from the Global Coalition on Women and AIDS and endorse its Statement of Support. (The Nonviolent Choice Directory is a proud endorser of this statement.)

--Whether or not you are personally HIV positive, you can check out the Treatment Action Campaign's extensive treatment literacy resources, including a number on mother-to-child transmission. Please consider a gift of time, money, publicity, or expertise to this most necessary organization. ..There are too many ghosts already...

PS on the Right to Life

Please remember the message I posted right under today's long deliberations on the UN death penalty debates:

Please don't forget to affirm the rights to life of women and children, born and unborn, by donating $10 or more to distribute the global family planning handbook to health providers in the Two-Thirds World.

Please do your part, however much you can spare, to call a global moratorium on unnecessary deaths of women and children through the lack of family planning knowledge and access.

Maternal Child Health Care Access on Earth

The Mother and Child Health (During & After Pregnancy) section (http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/motherchildhealth.html if the link doesn't work)of the Nonviolent Choice Directory now includes a subsection on Access to Maternal Child Health Care By Country (http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/motherchildhealth-careaccess.html if the link doesn't work).

And no, the work is not done...for one, one of oh so many many!!!--we KNOW that, yes, we are unquestionably morally responsible to publish links to all the HIV/AIDS mother-to-child-transmission (MTCT) prevention programs we can possibly discover on the Internet...and we haven't done that yet, either, among so, so much else....

Pardon Our Silence While....

...we are constructing, as part of our Directory, links to help women and children in just about every country on Earth find & access health care before, during, & after birth.

And to encourage greater public commitment everywhere to maternal and child health. This commitment is of course a human right in and of itself, but it also is a surefire protector of the human rights to life and nonviolent choice.

In the meantime, if you need something that can't wait, please email editor@nonviolentchoice.info and we'll see what we can do for you.

Not Only Children's but WOMEN'S Sacred Lives: The Global Crisis

Women Deliver: A Global Conference is scheduled for October 18-20, 2007 in London, England. The website delivers some quite sobering information on maternal/child health in global perspective. According to the online fact sheet "Unfortunate Facts of Life":

• More than 536,000 women die during pregnancy and childbirth every year. That is one every minute, or 10 million per generation – about the same as in 1987.
• Fully 42 percent of all pregnancies everywhere experience a complication. In 15 percent of all pregnancies, the complications are life-threatening.
• Fewer than one in 16,400 women will die in pregnancy or childbirth in the ten top-ranked countries; but one in seven will die in Niger, at the bottom of the list.
• This rich-poor disparity is the largest among all the public health indicators tracked by the World Health Organization.
• The poorer the household, the greater the risk of maternal death: 99 percent of maternal deaths occur in developing countries.
  

Ms. Turn the Clock Forward has already given an excellent analysis of the ways that abortion politics, on both "sides," hinder cooperation on and resolution of these giant, vital, life-and-death issues. So I won't repeat that, except to underscore the impertinent questions that folks like us constantly, pestiferously pose:

What stops so many good-hearted, action-bent people--whether they define themselves as prolife or prochoice--from completelyrecognizing and honoring both the lives and wellbeing of pregnant women and their fetuses, who after all are so profoundly interconnected, no matter how much anyone tries to sever them apart?

What immeasurably good things could and would happen next if they could get past this seemingly intractable obstacle to the realization of full human rights?

More Resources on Maternal Child Health

Our directory has expanded the Mother and Child Health section.

If we lack vital resources in this or any other section of the directory, please do not merely critcize; please make some constructive recommendations. That will help us to do a better job for you.