Make Mother’s Day more than shopping
The Gazette
May 11, 2008
The antecedents of our Mother's Day in the United States go back to 1858 when Anna Reeves Jarvis of West Virginia organized "Mothers' Work Day Clubs." These declared special days to promote better sanitation and provide medicine to the poor. During the Civil War, the clubs cared for soldiers on both sides and afterward promoted reconciliation.
The first "Mothers' Day" proclamation came from Julia Ward Howe in 1870, for a day of political protest by women against war. It included this call to mothers: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Let women now leave ... home for a great and earnest day of counsel with each other as to the means to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlements of international questions, the great and general interests of peace."
Those would seem relevant concerns for American mothers in 2008, as the Iraq war winds on longer than our own Civil War, with so many sons and daughters paying the price.
Instead, we are encouraged to do nothing more than make a continuing show of economic patriotism: to keep on shopping. With prospects for retail sales badly bruised by mortgage meltdowns and rumors of a recession, the National Retail Federation is keeping its fingers crossed. Will children and husbands open their wallets and match last year's $15 billion in sales for the holiday?
As we in America cruise the malls for Mother's Day bargains, elsewhere around the world 10,000 mothers will die this week, unnecessarily, of pregnancy and childbirth-related causes.
Back in 2000, the United States, in all the excitement of the advent of the millennium, joined 188 other nations to commit to put a stop to those kind of unnecessary deaths. This would happen through the global achievement by 2015 of eight Millennium Development Goals. One of those was to improve maternal health, with a target to reduce by three-quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality rate.
As usual, once the talk passed, there hasn't been much action. Women's health remains one of the most neglected areas of effort in the developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where most of the half-million yearly maternal deaths take place.
I'm not sure why that's the case. What's needed to save most of those women's lives is neither technically complicated nor financially costly. It is cheaper and much simpler, for example, to vaccinate women against tetanus than to get children protected against polio. Yet vaccination coverage rates for women have always been much lower than those of children.
A few fairly simple interventions could prevent most of the maternal deaths. It requires a wide-scale training of community-based midwives and equipping them with basic supplies and medicines. In places without doctors, these midwives need to be able to monitor blood pressure and take some protective action if it's high. They need to provide clean, safe deliveries with low risk of maternal infections and to initiate treatment where signs of such infection appear. They need to recognize and stop postpartum hemorrhage.
Those capacities in community-based midwives could prevent about half of maternal deaths. Family planning for women and better child protection to prevent pregnancies in teenage girls would prevent another quarter of those deaths. Much of the rest of the carnage relating to pregnancy and childbirth comes from botched abortions.
Ah ha! Family planning and abortions. Those contentious issues, I suspect, are the real cause of slow progress to prevent maternal deaths around the world. Our ideological battles here in America, between the rigidly pro-life and the rigidly pro choice, have cast the issues of women's health in the developing countries into the arena of political controversy. Our noisy disagreements at home have paralyzed concerted international action abroad.
The result is that 500,000 innocent mothers in the coming year will have neither choice, nor life; they will become one more mortality statistic on a report card.
It's our report card, the one that has a section called "Faith," another called "Principles" and a third one, the one we are failing, labeled "Works."
Happy Mother's Day. Let's make it something more than shopping.
______________
Alan Brody, a writer and consultant from Iowa City, is former UNICEF representative in Swaziland and a recently installed member of the board of the U.N. Association of Iowa.
