Monday, October 26, 2009

Maternal Mortality

I heard this on National Public Radio this morning, and I'm still shaking my head:

From the BBC World News:  
Health ministers from around the world have agreed that swift action must be taken to reduce the number of women dying during pregnancy and childbirth.
At the UN Population Fund meeting in Addis Ababa the ministers said the number of women dying in this way was actually increasing in some nations.
My basic response to this:  WHY DID IT TAKE YOU SO LONG TO NOTICE??  This has only been going on for, what?  A hundred thousand years?  A million?  How old is the human race?

Gee, women die when they try to have babies.  What a surprise!  Who ARE these yo-yos, anyway, and how many of them are female?  (Guess.)

Not that I disagree.  I think it would be a good thing to reduce maternal mortality; I even agree that family planning is the best way to go about it.  I definitely agree that the rich world is directing all its health aid dollars to "fashionable" diseases like AIDS (stuff that kills us; we don't die in childbed - mostly), and blowing off aid for primary health care which would actually do something about maternal mortality.

I'm just floored by the sheer effrontery of it all; we've just noticed, so it must be a real problem.  Men!

1 comment:

  1. Childbirth is obviously the fault of men--in the first place.

    Second, having children is a bad business, and should be stopped--or at least significantly curtailed--in the interests of public health.

    Maternity should be treated like all public health issues--the more people suffer and die from it, the more funding it should get.

    How about societies in which women are, in effect, second-class citizens, or de-facto slaves (of men)?

    Let's just nuke all the Muslim societies around the world and be done with them.

    Better yet, let's see that women have their babies in hospitals, where all the modern conveniences and scientific tools are available to prevent complications and mitigate injury.

    Third World women will have to wait for better days.

    In the meantime....

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