Women Deliver 2010: Lot more needs to be done to save women’s lives
To listen to the audio podcast of exclusive interview with Women Deliver 2010 co-chair Dr Sai, click here
“At the global level we don’t only have the issue of deaths of women and child, pregnancy and child-birth related situations, but it is the discrepancy between these deaths in the northern and more industrialized countries and in the developing countries. In fact, today as we speak we know that practically no woman dies in child birth in Europe or North America. But they do die in South Asia, Africa and Latin America” said Dr Frederick Torgbor Sai, an internationally recognized gender and reproductive health advocate from Ghana, who is the co-chair of “Women Deliver 2010” in Washington DC, USA (7-9 June). Read more
Too many women and newborns are dying worldwide during pregnancy and childbirth. Every year, between 350,000 – 500,000 girls and women die from pregnancy-related causes. Almost all of these deaths (99%) occur in the developing world. Four million newborn babies die every year, also from causes that are mainly preventable and typically linked to the mother’s health.
“The causes of maternal death are not very different. The technologies and the approaches to do something about these deaths have been known for a very long time. So why is it that we continue to see them so very frequently in developing countries particularly in Asia and Africa. Recently we have seen that these deaths are coming down in Latin America and in many other parts of the world. Africa in particular doesn’t show that it is coming down too much” said Dr Sai in an exclusive interview to CNS.
Dr Sai was the moderator for the 1987 Safe Motherhood Conference which launched the Safe Motherhood Initiative and chairman for the Main Committees of the International Conference on Population in Mexico in 1984 and of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), in Cairo in 1994. It was this last conference which produced the Programme of Action, emphasizing the centrality of women to all development programmes and called for world attention to the improvement in the status of women and for equity and equality between the sexes as the basis of all human relationships.
“When we met in Cairo