Mothers and Maternal Health Care
This was originally a writing sample I wrote for a job application, proving my blog-style writing. I like it, and I figure it's as good a start as any: if we're gonna do this, let's do this right.
Let's talk about maternity and maternal health care.
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I have a story to tell.
Twenty years ago, a woman was pregnant with a baby. It was her fourteenth pregnancy that she knew of, and the first one that seemed to have a chance of going to term. Both she and her younger brother had been adopted, so she’d never really seen a pregnancy up close. She was thirty-eight years old, and was struggling to believe that the baby could actually survive. The woman suffered from high blood pressure and severe morning sickness. She was bedridden, and marooned in her house while her friends and husband worked. She couldn’t believe that she was going to have a baby, especially once she celebrated her thirty-ninth birthday.
In fact, the baby was born only two weeks early, kicking and screaming. She was born at the shift change during the Christmas holidays, and so the woman had two sets of nurses and two doctors with her. The baby was heatlhy, and came home for New Year’s Day.
The woman had dreamed of a big family, with multiple children. The doctors now told her that was impossible, that having a baby at thirty-nine had ruined the chances of having any other children, and that any future pregnancies would be too dangerous besides. The woman and her husband decided to celebrate the only child they’d have, a daughter. They reoriented their plans for the future, and poured their hopes and confidence into this tiny child.
Five years later, the woman became sick with the flu, sick enough that she began to worry. The doctor took blood, ran tests, and came up with an answer the woman could hardly believe was true: she was forty-four years old, and pregnant with a baby boy.
This raised a conflict for the woman and her husband. They wanted another child, to expand their family and give their daughter a brother. The problem was this: the woman had high blood pressure, and the pregnancy would be dangerous. If she strained herself, the baby could die. The baby could take enough nutrients and stress my mother so much that she would die.
It came to the point where the doctor told the woman she’d have to choose: the baby’s life, or her own.
The woman found another doctor, who told her the same thing.
She decided to try to carry the pregnancy to term, but the baby was born two months early when her blood pressure developed into toxemia. Labor was induced, and at seven minutes to seven on an October morning, a baby boy came into the world, so tiny he could fit into his fathers cupped hands.
You might have guessed by now: that woman is my mom, her husband my dad, and the delicate baby boy, my younger brother.
My mother and brother survived by the grace of modern medicine, and the security that came with having an upper-middle class life. My mom was able to go to the best hospital in our state for premature births, and she was carefully monitored the whole time. My brother, born two months early and so tiny he had to wear my doll clothes instead of baby clothes, was given expert treatment, and has since grown into a strong, tall teenager. He’s so athletic and healthy, you would never doctors had predicted he wouldn’t walk and would have mental deficiencies.
I am lucky. A traumatic pregnancy resulted in a brother and a living mother. If I’d been born fifty years ago, who knows what could have happened? If I had been born into a poorer family, we wouldn’t have had that life-saving medical access. If my family had been in a country without those medical resources, without my parents being educated about their options…maybe my father would have been a widower and a motherless child when I was only five years old.
Unfortunately, this fear and danger is par for the course for too many women. This TED talk by Sue Desmond-Hellman discusses the dangers of pregnancy, in a discomfortingly easy format to follow. It’s as simple as the culture surrounding naming a baby: my parents always knew my brother would be given my father’s name, because they knew he would survive. Desmond-Hellman reminds us that some mothers don’t give their babies names, in the hopes that it will hurt less when they die.
Take a few moments to watch it. You won’t regret it.
Women the world over deserve to have health care, as do their newborn babies. According to UNICEF, 99% of maternal mortality occurs in the developing world, because over 50% of women give birth without a doctor, nurse, or midwife to assist them. UNICEF’s article explains this better than I ever could, with better statistics and translations, so I recommend you go read that. The basics of it, though, is that women don’t have access to health care, and so childbirth is incredibly risky.
Did you ever learn in school that the two ways for Spartans to get a marked tomb were to either die in battle or to die in childbirth? I did, and it’s stuck with me: childbirth is so risky, so painful, so dangerous, that the Spartans, badass stone-cold warriors that they were, equated childbirth with battle. That says a lot, I think. The CDC’s article is also helpful, so check out their whole site.
We also have to acknowledge, for mothers to be healthy, their right to not be mothers. Yeah, I know, that sounds kind of counter-intuitive. Here’s the thing: mothers know when they can take care of a child. They know if they have the money, the food, the shelter, the social support to raise a child. It takes a village, right? Well, in the US, it also takes about $250,000 to raise a child from 0-18 in the US. Talk about expensive.
If a mother knows she can’t take care of her coming child, she’s likely going to do something about it. The United States has something called Safe Haven laws, initiated by George W Bush in the late 1990s. If a mother is unable to care for her baby, and the child is less than a month old, she can leave her child at a hospital, police station or fire station without fear of persecution. The child will be placed into foster care, and the mother will not be charged with child abandonment. Unfortunately, a lot of the world doesn’t have laws like that. Safe haven on the international scale often refers to tax shelters, which is about as far from maternal health as you can get.
So what’s a pregnant woman who can’t support her child to do? Well. Abort the child, perhaps. But what if abortion is illegal, expensive, inaccessible? She might resort to risky tactics to harm herself and terminate the pregnancy. You ever wonder why women advocating for access to abortion in the US often have wire coat hangers? Women who want abortions, and who don’t want to be mothers will find a way to have an abortion, and it will likely endanger their life. Here’s a TED talk by Aspen Baker about why abortions need to be a part of the maternal health discussion.
Beyond that, medicine for women is often dangerous. Tested on men, and mixed with other medications, it could end badly. This TED Talk by Alyson McGregor goes into more detail about what happens and why. Abortions wouldn’t be as much of a problem if birth control was more widely accepted and available. Melinda Gates (yes, the wife of Bill Gates) gives a pretty good TED talk on it. (I know, this is a lot of TED talks. But they’re well researched, and so much more eloquent than I am.)
I’m not even tackling the issues of child marriage, or mistreatment of women. (here’s two good TED talks…and the TED talk playlist about women, you should just watch all of them so I don’t have to recommend all of them.) There are so many reasons why women aren’t getting the care and support they need, and feel that they have no other options, because…well, they really don’t have other options.
Mothers deserve to have health care. They deserve to give their children the best life they can, and they deserve to have the respect of the planet. They deserve to have safe, healthy births, and if they don’t believe they are ready to be a mother, they deserve to have safe, healthy abortions, with good medical care.
Women birthed all of us. Women will birth this planet’s future. It’s mothers that are responsible for the future of the planet.
Don’t we want to make sure that future is a good one?