excellent article on childbirth - Africa compared with Europe

[hatwoman]

bit slow off the mark (at work, can't post much) but this is a really good read here

Thanks for posting - I meant to read this but lost the paper. I found it interesting, but it also made me want to ask more questions about 'natural birth' versus 'medicalised birth'. Do the women need a more medicalised birth, or just better sanitation and drugs after the birth? Is their experience of child birth worse than, for instance, the experience of childbirth for people in Niger and Sweden 200 years ago?

I agree - I think it depends what you mean by "medicalised". But it's this stuff that I want to throw - somewhat angrily sometimes - when some people harp on about "natural" birth, and us having been doing it for hundreds of years, etc. Yes, that's true, but we have to be very careful not to idealise birth and be naive.

A fascinating and thought-provoking article. Thank goodness for modern medicine.

The word "medicalised" has become a dirty word in the context of childbirth, but this article shows how vital proper medical care is in saving women's and babies' lives.

I think its true that today we often fail to realise the risks that we are exposed to during pregnancy and childbirth and how our modern medicine helps to protect us. I have read somewhere (may have remembered this wrong, so feel free to correct me) that childbirth is still be biggest killer of women in the world (may be just in the developing world).

Very thought provoking article. Really shocking for the women in Niger - I suppose that is where we all were 100+ years ago. Grim
I guess there must be a balance between unnecessary intervention & optimal care.

What an interesting article. I'm currently living in Nigeria and there is no free health care at all. I agree about the low-cost interventions. When we lived in Indonesia, which has a pretty awful maternal death rate, I learned that 80% of maternal deaths were due to haemorrage and 80% of haemorrages were caused by anaemia. For the meagre cost of a few pence for three months supply of iron tablets the vast majority of those deaths could be avoided yet no one seems to care enough to implement even that simple measure.