Saving mothers and babies

WE have just six years to go before the formal reckoning of our country’s commitment to end poverty by 2015. If you will remember, all UN member-states pledged in 2000 to meet the Millennium Development Goals: to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empower women, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensure environmental sustainability and develop a global partnership for development.

UN agencies in the Philippines, assessing developments in the country’s march toward meeting these eight goals, have said that while we are on our way to meeting most of the MDGs, we are lagging in the achievement of universal primary education, with about 30 percent of school-age children unable to finish their elementary education; in the struggle to reduce the incidence of HIV/AIDS; and in the improvement of maternal and child mortality.

Why are we failing to save the lives of our mothers and babies? A major reason is the lack of commitment to maternal health, which also affects the health of fetuses and newborns. Mothers whose health have been compromised, either by malnutrition, disease or any of the “toos”—too young or too old, too many children, pregnancies too close together—run the risk of dying during pregnancy or at childbirth, delivering underweight babies and risking their survival at birth or infancy.

The health of mothers and babies is a major part of reproductive health, a term that is accepted the world over as covering the full range of concerns around sex, pregnancy, safe delivery and diseases of the reproductive system. It’s unfortunate that the present leadership has chosen to view “reproductive health” as a code word for abortion only, even if the prevention of abortion, the provision of safe abortion services and the timely and correct response to abortion complications are a legitimate part of reproductive health.

But we are now realizing that unless we embrace reproductive health and rights as a legitimate public health goal, we won’t be able to save the lives of enough mothers and children, much less achieve the MDGs by 2015.

ref: dailyinquirer