Mothers and Babies in Afghanistan

These articles are several years old. Recent reports are that life in Afghanistan, especially for women and children is worse this year. Billions and billions of dollars later ...

Birth shadowed by death

Afghanistan: A Johns Hopkins-linked program combats tragically high maternal and infant mortality by training midwives

By Douglas Birch Sun Foreign Staff

May 27, 2004

"We have a local midwife," Abdul said. "But she has no education."

23,000 Afghan mothers die in childbirth each year, making it the nation's leading cause of death for women.

Biggest cause of death

It's also the single biggest health threat that Afghan women face, claiming the lives of more expectant mothers each year than malnutrition and war. It is a public health catastrophe with few parallels elsewhere in the world.

In the United States, the lifetime risk of death in childbirth is one death out of every 2,500 women - the risks for any individual depending greatly on the number of times she gives birth. In Afghanistan, the figure is one in six.

Giving birth is perilous here partly because of the nation's poverty; the lack of roads, clinics and health workers; and partly because the country's culture has blocked health care advances.

In the US only 3% of birth are at home. One third of all births are surgical births and many of those are believed to be unnecessary and doctor-induced. In Afghanistan women do not have the option of hospital birth.

Only 8 percent of Afghan births occur outside the home but that figure might soon rise. In interviews, village elders across eastern Afghanistan said that they want their wives, sisters and cousins to go to clinics or hospitals to give birth.

another article:

Feature-Women dying to give birth in Afghanistan

By Angie Ramos

ISHKASHIM, Afghanistan, Feb 22 (Reuters) - Gulnama Shamsali sips tea and tries to calm her screaming six-month-old son as her husband and his four siblings quietly nibble their lunch -- a few pieces of stale wheat bread -- in their cold, dark mud house.

In two months, Gulnama, still only 22, will give birth to her second child.

And she could die from doing so.

The nearest hospital is 100 km (60 miles) away, four to five days by donkey, the most common transport in rural Afghanistan.

But Gulnama, whose youthful face is scarred by patches of frostbite from the bitter winter weather in her native Badakhshan province, says she is not worried. "I will give birth and their destiny belongs to God. He will save them," she said.

According to U.N. data, Afghanistan has among the world's highest rates of maternal mortality, and remote, impoverished, Badakhshan has the highest rates ever recorded anywhere in the world, with one mother dying in every 15 births.

It is not difficult to see why.

The province is spectacularly beautiful, with high mountains and deep valleys blanketed by green in spring and summer, red in autumn, and white in winter.

But this beauty masks extreme poverty, an absence of physical infrastructure, a lack of skilled health workers, high illiteracy and social pressure on women to bear many children.

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