By the end of the editorial it is noted that Zara died
Terror of Childbirth
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF
N'DJAMENA, Chad
Zara Fatimé, a 15-year-old girl, was in labor for four days before her family loaded her onto public transportation — the back of a truck — and took her to the dilapidated National General Reference Hospital here on Tuesday. Her blood pressure was high, 170/80, and she soon lapsed into a coma. The baby arrived stillborn. Zara needed oxygen, but the hospital had none to spare.
"We have the knowledge to save these people," Dr. Grace Kodindo, Chad's first female obstetrician, said with a sigh. "But we lose them because of a lack of tiny amounts of money." When she started, Dr. Kodindo was one of only 2 obstetricians serving a country of nine million people; now there are 15.
Each year, 500,000 women die, almost one per minute, in pregnancy or childbirth in the third world. Childbirth is terrifying for most of the world's people. As a local proverb here in Chad puts it: A woman who is pregnant has one foot in the grave.
The world needs a war on maternal mortality, and the U.S. could lead that effort. Yet maternal care rarely gets the priority or attention it deserves. Partly that's because the victims tend to be faceless, illiterate village women who carry little weight in their own families, let alone on the national or world agenda.
…Instead of providing leadership in the struggle against maternal mortality, the U.S. has recently retreated.
President Bush has cut off the entire American contribution, $34 million a year, to the United Nations Population Fund, which organizes programs like training for midwives. That's crucial because untrained midwives sometimes do more harm than good: in eastern Chad, they deal with a breech delivery by finding two strong men to hold the woman upside down and shake her to encourage the fetus to move around.
Then there's the Reproductive Health Response in Conflict Consortium, which helps young mothers in countries like Sierra Leone, Angola and Mozambique. The Bush administration cut off all funds to the consortium last year.
In both cases, the administration cut the funds because those groups supposedly cooperated with China's repressive family-planning program. Mr. Bush is right to complain about coercive abortions in China, but why take it out on African women?
