One mum's appeal to ease childbirth fears in Africa

Campaign: Anne Scott, vice-president of Child Fund International. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Anne Scott's baby survived cord crisis - elsewhere, it would have died.

When Anne Scott gave birth to her second child in Britain seven years ago, the umbilical cord got caught around the baby's neck. Her midwife called for help. "A doctor was there in two seconds," she says. She and her baby survived.

"In a place like New Zealand, or the UK where I had my children, I didn't emotionally expect to die as a result of giving birth. It never crossed my mind," she says.

"Pregnancy and childbirth in a family should be a time of joy and looking forward."

But it's not like that in countries such as Botswana, where Ms Scott took her sons for a year when they were 2 and 4, or in the Palestinian territories, where she took them for three years before becoming vice-president of the US-based aid agency Child Fund two years ago.

Women in those countries, and in most of the world, still fear pregnancy. "Most of them will have experienced a relative or a friend who died in childbirth," Ms Scott says.

A divorced solo mum who cares for her sons with the help of her own mother and a live-in teacher, Ms Scott has been in New Zealand this week promoting Child Fund's Mothers' Day appeal for children and their mothers in Kenya.

The appeal comes as the United Nations lobbies Governments to give more priority to cutting the worldwide rate of mothers dying in childbirth by three-quarters by 2015 - one of eight "millennium development goals (MDGs)" agreed by world leaders in 2000.

A new study published by Australian and US academics last month estimated that the global maternal death rate dropped from 320 for every 100,000 births in 1990 to 251 in 2008, an impressive drop of almost a quarter but still well short of the three-quarters target.

The maternal death rate is only 17 for every 100,000 births in New Zealand and the US, and only 5 per 100,000 in Australia and Sweden. "For too long, maternal and child health has been at the back of the MDG train," said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last month. He has invited world leaders to a new summit in New York in September to accelerate progress.

Ms Scott says Child Fund works with local communities to make sure pregnant and breastfeeding mothers eat well instead of giving the best food to their husbands, and to plan ahead so that transport is available to get a mother to hospital in an emergency.

"There is sometimes not a car available, but there's usually a small motorcycle that's feasible for a woman to ride on the back of," she says. "If she's haemorrhaging or has a very high fever, she's not going to be able to walk 10km."

Ms Scott says people in poor countries have lived with death for generations and often simply accept it. "There's a certain fatalism. When I worked in Palestine, it was 'In sa' Allah' [God's will]," she says. "But we involved local teachers and imams and traditional clan leaders in Palestine."

In Egypt, the maternal death rate has already been cut by more than three-quarters since 2008.

DYING MOTHERS
Maternal deaths per 100,000 births

* 5 Australia, Sweden.

* 17 New Zealand, United States.

* 251 Global average.

www.childfund.org.nz