Daily Graphic, Pg. 11. Tuesday, April 14/09
Story: Rebecca Quaicoe-Duho
The Ghana Millennium Development Goal (MDG) campaign coalition has launched a poster aimed at educating people on maternal mortality issues.
The move forms part of efforts to promote women’s access to quality health care and enhance the attainment of MDG5, which aims at reducing maternal mortality by three quarters by 2015 globally.
Dubbed 'Nye Bloaa', (translated to mean ‘make noise’) the poster is a social call on people to put in more effort to help reduce the maternal mortality ratio in the country. The caption of the poster, which was originally developed in Swahili and dubbed ‘Piga Debee’, literally translated to mean ‘to shout’, was adopted by the MDG campaign coalition.
In Ghana it is estimated that 210 women out of every 100,000 die from pregnancy related cases and the MDG5 aims to improve maternal health under two targets. One is to reduce maternal deaths and the other to provide universal access to reproductive health. However, according to health experts, little progress has been made over the past two decades.
It is further estimated that every year more than 500,000 women die in pregnancy and childbirth and over 50 million suffer from poor reproductive health. Many pregnant women in developing countries have little or no access to health services or trained professionals like midwives, and according to health experts, changing this station will be the difference between life and death for many mothers and their unborn children.
It is said that most women die because there is not enough skilled, regular and emergency care. Although some women have access to skilled birth care in some parts of the world such as in developed countries and sub-Saharan Africa, it is estimated that one in 16 women stand the risk of dying during pregnancy or childbirth over a lifetime, compared with about one in 2,800 women in the developed world.
Ms Akua Sena Dansua, the Minster for Women and Children’s Affairs (MOWAC), launched the poster on behalf of the coalition at a public forum on the theme “Reducing maternal mortality, a women's right”, organised by the Ghana MDGs Campaign under the Christian Council of Ghana (CCG) in Accra.
She said “women faced various challenges mainly due to their disadvantaged situation of lower education and poverty which resulted in lack of self-confidence to assert what is their basic right in the area of reproductive health rights.”
According to her, MOWAC acknowledges that achieving the MDG5 is central to the achievement of all the other MDGs, stressing that the country’s inability to achieve MDG5 would hamper other critical efforts necessary for the achievement of the other MDGs.
She said majority of women who died through child birth or pregnancy were adolescent girls and this was because “we have failed to provide them with adequate adolescent friendly services and information about their sexuality to enable them take decisions concerning their lives and well-being”.
She therefore stressed the need for collaboration between religious bodies and organisations to establish youth friendly faculties to enable the youth take decisions and make informed choices concerning their lives and for their well-being.
She said although some churches were not in favour of contraceptive usage, the reality was that church members were not abstaining from sex while some married couples in the church do not want to practise family planning.
“I believe we can save lives and promote life by planning our families to prevent unwanted pregnancies which are likely to result in unsafe abortions. The demands for religious doctrines notwithstanding, we should be able in our rationality to appreciate the proven benefits of science in safe contraceptive methods”, she added.
A gynaecologist at the La General Hospital, Dr Emmanuel Ameh, mentioned some of the immediate causes of maternal mortality as haemorrhage, which according to him, contributes to 25 per cent of maternal deaths; pregnancy induced hypertension, 17 per cent; infection 22 per cent; obstructed labour 11 per cent; unsafe abortion 13 per cent, while other causes account for 22 per cent.
He said most of these deaths, which are associated with remote socio-cultural causes such as the status of women, cultural practices, religion, education, economic and environmental/infrastructure were preventable.
The Executive Secretary of the Society for Women and AIDS in Africa (SWAA), Mrs Cecilia Lordonu, who also gave a presentation on maternal mortality said although ante-natal and delivery services were free, women still did not have easy access to such facilities.
According to her most women were losing their lives because they were still patronising the services of traditional birth attendance (TBAs), some of whom lacked professional competence. She therefore called on the government to ensure that TBAs were given professional training as a way of helping to reduce the country’s maternal mortality.
Mrs Lordonu also mentioned some customs and traditional practices as contributory factors to maternal mortality and that in some rural communities, custom demanded that women had to seek permission from their husbands before they attended ante-natal care.
The General Secretary of the CCG, Reverend Fred Deegbe, said there was the need for more women to be educated on their reproductive rights, adding that when women are given such education, other members of the family, including their children and husbands also benefit.
He said the causes of maternal mortality were known and, therefore, there was the need for proactive measures to reduce it.
Rev. Alfred Kwabi of the Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) campaign of the Ghana MDG Secretariat, said the level of infant mortality in the country was unacceptable and called for a concerted effort to address it.
He called on the Ministry of Health to intensify efforts to ensure that every pregnant woman seeks ante-natal care, through the provision of more ante-natal care centres across the country.
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