Safe Passages: A Pro-Life Response to the Tragedy of Maternal Deaths

By Terrence McKeegan, J.D. | July 7, 2011


I just came across this article published in May of this year in the Linacre Quarterly, which is part of a new initiative of the American Association of Pro Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG). The co-authors, who have worked extensively in maternal health and training of OB/GYNs in Africa, succinctly identify the problems of the established reproductive health regime and offer some proven solutions from their experience on the ground.

Here is an excerpt:

For more than twenty years, the United Nations has promised to address and resolve the tragedy of maternal deaths in the developing world, yet in vast sectors of Africa, little has changed. Women continue to die of complications, which have been effectively treated in the developed world for nearly one hundred years. The most recent estimates of maternal mortality indicate that the maternal death rate in Africa is still 640 per 100,000 live births, compared to a rate of 14 per 100,000 in developed countries. This is the widest known disparity in comparative public-health statistics.

In 1987, the “Safe Motherhood Initiative” was launched in Nairobi, Kenya. Since that time, increasing attention and funding have been directed to reducing maternal deaths under the umbrella of “Safe Motherhood.” Reducing maternal mortality by three-quarters by 2015 is one of the five United Nations millennium goals.

While there is universal agreement on the need to reach this goal, the question of how to do so is not only elusive, but extraordinarily divisive. There remains a chasm between the villages of Africa and the cities of Geneva, Stockholm, London, and Washington, D.C. It is the chasm representing the distance between a woman dying in a birthing hut without sanitation, running water, or hope, and the carpeted board rooms where strategies are developed and priorities assigned. Vast resources, which should have been directed to funding improvements in essential obstetrical care, have gone to a different agenda—so called “reproductive health.” Rather than focus on the real causes and solutions to maternal mortality, Safe Motherhood has become entangled within a “reproductive rights” agenda, which emphasizes access to contraception and promotes abortion.

In the middle of the night, a woman bleeding to death from a postpartum hemorrhage cannot be saved by a contraceptive device or a reproductive health mandate. An asphyxiated newborn cannot be resuscitated by the failed intent to prevent his or her conception.

Data from the World Health Organization (WHO) demonstrate women in Africa die from five major causes: hypertensive diseases, obstructed labor, hemorrhage, sepsis and infection, and HIV-related diseases.

While the exact prevalence varies from region to region (for example, Southern and Eastern Africa have higher HIV infection rates), the same complications are generally present (see table 1). Tragically, the prevailing reproductive-health paradigm has not only ignored this data, it has betrayed the basic premise of obstetrical care: obstetrics is the care of two persons: a mother and her fetus. How is it that Safe Motherhood became invested primarily in preventing women from becoming pregnant, rather than caring for women who are expecting a baby and the baby itself? In the extreme, advocates for Safe Motherhood have been advocates of expansive medical and surgical abortion, regardless of its safety and the lack of facility-based care for post-abortion complications. In an Orwellian way, an abortion-driven agenda has become more important than the lives of African mothers …

Read the full article here.

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