Category Archives: Maternal health

Women’s health being neglected worldwide, says Melinda French Gates

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Exclusive: Billionaire launches $250m fund to address problem as she warns of growth of ‘maternity care deserts’

Women’s health is being neglected worldwide with “maternity care deserts” more common, millions denied abortions and maternal death rates surging, Melinda French Gates has warned as she launches a $250m (£190m) fund to improve women’s physical and mental health globally.

Despite advances in medicine, women experience “unacceptable” inequities across all aspects of their health, spend more years living with ill health and still face barriers to accessing basic care. Women in rich and poor nations are affected and more than 700 are dying in childbirth each day, French Gates said.

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Global health charities warn of ‘huge and terrible’ threat to abortion rights if Trump returns

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‘Global gag rule’ and funding cuts will be ‘on different scale’ if Republicans win again, family-planning providers say

Providers of women’s healthcare around the world are preparing for potentially disastrous consequences should Donald Trump win the US presidential election in November.

Policies pursued during Trump’s last presidency caused “devastating” harm in a number of countries, said Beth Schlachter, a senior director at MSI Reproductive Choices in the US. It meant “clinics shuttered, health teams closed, women dying … but a second Trump term will be on a different scale”.

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Doctor behind trial of HIV prevention drug recounts breakthrough moment

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Prof Linda-Gail Bekker receives ovation at Aids summit after presenting trial results of ‘miracle’ drug lenacapavir

When the doctor behind the trial of a new HIV prevention drug heard the results, she could not contain her emotions. “I literally burst into tears,” said Prof Linda-Gail Bekker.

“I’m 62, I’ve lived through this epidemic … I had family members who died of HIV, as did many, many Africans – many people around the world,” she said.

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DRC offers free maternity care to cut death rate among mothers and babies

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Healthcare workers say clinics are being overwhelmed by women seeking help, amid lack of staff and facilities to back programme

Pregnant women across the Democratic Republic of the Congo are to be offered free healthcare in an effort to cut the country’s high rates of maternal and neonatal deaths.

Women in 13 out of 26 regions in the country will, by the end of the year, be entitled to free services during pregnancy and for one month after childbirth. Babies will receive free healthcare for their first 28 days under the scheme, which the government plans to extend to the rest of DRC – although there is no timetable for that yet.

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Climate crisis is ‘not gender neutral’: UN calls for more policy focus on women

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Only a third of countries with climate crisis plans include access to sexual, maternal and newborn health services, UNFPA report finds

Only a third of countries include sexual and reproductive health in their national plans to tackle the climate crisis, the UN has warned.

Of the 119 countries that have published plans, only 38 include access to contraception, maternal and newborn health services and just 15 make any reference to violence against women, according to a report published by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and Queen Mary University of London on Tuesday.

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Hospital detentions for new mothers challenged in Ugandan court

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Two cases to be heard this month could serve as legal precedent to outlaw the holding of patients against their will for unpaid bills

Two women who were prevented from leaving hospital over unpaid medical bills are to have their case against Ugandan authorities heard this month in a case that lawyers hope will end the practice.

Akello Esther Susan, 23, and NS (known by her initials) are jointly suing the government, two district councils and church dioceses over their treatment after giving birth in 2020 and 2021 respectively.

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Women’s health at risk from UK aid cuts, Foreign Office warned

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Thousands more women will be forced into unsafe abortions and die in pregnancy and childbirth, ministers told

Hundreds of thousands more women will face unsafe abortions and thousands will die in pregnancy and childbirth as a result of UK aid cuts in 2023-24, Foreign Office ministers were warned in an internal assessment.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) published its programme allocations for the next two years last month, showing that official development assistance (ODA) spend is due to rise marginally in 2023-24 and then increase by 12% in 2024-25 to £8.3bn.

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Rising temperatures causing distress to foetuses, study reveals

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Climate crisis increases risks for subsistence farmers in Africa who usually work throughout pregnancy

Rising temperatures driven by climate breakdown are causing distress to the foetuses of pregnant farmers, who are among the worst affected by global heating.

A study revealed that the foetuses of women working in fields in the Gambia showed concerning rises in heart rates and reductions in the blood flow to the placenta as conditions became hotter. The women, who do much of the agricultural labour and work throughout pregnancy, told the scientists that temperatures had noticeably increased in the past decade.

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‘The hospital has nothing’: Pakistan’s floods put pregnant women in danger

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A third of the country is under water and a UN fund says almost 650,000 women in affected areas need maternity services

Crying, vomiting and eight months pregnant, the young woman walked in labour pains for an hour in search of an ambulance.

When Naseeba Ameerullah, 23, eventually found one, she had to beg the driver to take her. Pakistan’s floods had left the roads damaged and gridlocked, making what is usually a two-hour journey to the provincial capital of Quetta a punishing, 12-hour drive.

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Sierra Leone backs bill to legalise abortion and end colonial-era law

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Country hails ‘monumental step’ towards expanding reproductive rights at a time when the US has overturned them

Ministers in Sierra Leone have taken a major step towards decriminalising abortion and overturning the country’s colonial-era law, in a move hailed by campaigners and women’s rights activists.

President Julius Maada Bio said his cabinet had unanimously backed a bill on risk-free motherhood, which would expand access to abortion in a country where terminations are only permitted when a mother’s life is at risk.

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US supreme court abortion reversal would be global ‘catastrophe’ for women

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If Roe v Wade is overturned, it will encourage anti-choice groups – particularly in the developing world, activists warn

The probable demise of abortion as a federal right in the US will be a “catastrophe” for women in low and middle-income countries, with an emboldened anti-choice movement likely to raise renewed pressure on hard-won gains, doctors and activists have warned.

The leak this month of the US supreme court’s draft majority opinion, which argued that the 1973 ruling effectively legalising abortion had been “egregiously wrong from the start”, stunned and enraged many in America.

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‘They lost almost everything’: photographing the terror and joy of refugees in DRC

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Alexis Huguet’s image of this twin girl, born as her mother fled into Congo, captures the fragility of life in the Central African Republic

The picture is a joyful one. Laure, a midwife at a health facility in Ndu, a village in the Democratic Republic of Congo, holds a healthy newborn girl. The baby’s mother, Ester, was at the health centre for a postnatal appointment after giving birth to twin daughters.

A couple of weeks earlier, when she was heavily pregnant and due to go into labour at any moment, Ester was forced to leave her home in Bangassou, on the other side of a river, in the neighbouring Central African Republic.

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Pregnant women at risk in Malawi as drug shortage prevents caesareans

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Patients travelling long distances to find surgery cancelled as lack of anaesthetics shuts operating theatres in half of hospitals

Almost half of Malawi’s district hospitals have closed their operating theatres due to a dire shortage of anaesthetics.

Maternity care has been affected by a lack of drugs, said doctors. Surgery, including caesareans, has been cancelled and patients needing emergency care have been moved hundreds of miles around the country.

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Texas anti-abortion law shows ‘terrifying’ fragility of women’s rights, say activists

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Campaigners fear ban emboldens anti-choice governments as more aggressive opposition, better organised and funded, spreads from US

The new anti-abortion law in Texas is a “terrifying” reminder of the fragility of hard-won rights, pro-choice activists have said, as they warn of a “more aggressive, much better organised [and] better funded” global opposition movement.

Pro-choice campaigners have seen several victories in recent years, including in Ireland, Argentina and, most recently, Mexico, where the supreme court ruled last week that criminalising abortion was unconstitutional. Another is hoped for later this month when the tiny enclave of San Marino, landlocked within Italy, holds a highly charged referendum.

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The Taliban are not the only threat to Afghanistan. Aid cuts could undo 20 years of progress

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The most vulnerable people will bear the cost of sanctions, as services and the economy collapse

Watching Afghanistan’s unfolding trauma, I’ve thought a lot about Mumtaz Ahmed, a young teacher I met a few years ago. Her family fled Kabul during Taliban rule in the late 1990s.

Raised as a refugee in Pakistan, Ahmed had defied the odds and made it to university. Now, she was back in Afghanistan teaching maths in a rural girls’ school. “I came back because I believe in education and I love my country,” she told me. “These girls have a right to learn – without education, Afghanistan has no future.”

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Delivering babies in a Nigerian camp: ‘I’ve had to use plastic bags as gloves’

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After seeing a woman die in childbirth, Liyatu Ayuba stepped in and has now delivered 118 babies in a community cut off from public health services

Having watched a woman and her baby die needlessly after being refused admission to a hospital over a lack of money, Liyatu Ayuba wanted to never let it happen again.

The 62-year-old is one of Nigeria’s nearly 3 million internally displaced people (IDPs) – driven out of their homes by the violence of the Boko Haram Islamist militants. Ayuba fled Gwoza in the north-eastern state of Borno in 2011 with her family. After her husband was killed by Boko Haram and her teenage son badly wounded, she went to the makeshift Durumi 1 IDP camp, in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, where about 500 families live.

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Nepal sees huge rise in maternal deaths as Covid keeps women at home

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Health workers fear deaths could reach levels not seen this century as up to 90% miss check-ups and many opt for home births

Earlier this month, 21-year-old Lakhu BK decided to have her baby at home in her village in the far west of Nepal. She had feared contracting Covid-19 if she went to a health centre. She lost her life giving birth.

“I thought my daughter-in-law will die from [the] virus but did not think she would die from being unable to give birth,” said her mother-in-law, Pamfi BK, 50.

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‘I refuse to visit his grave’: the trauma of mothers caught in Israel-Gaza conflict

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Many women have lost children, been separated from newborns or are unable to breastfeed and bond with their babies because of the war

In the last month of her pregnancy, May al-Masri was preparing dinner when a rocket landed outside her home in northern Gaza, killing her one-year-old son, Yasser.

Masri had felt the explosion’s shockwave when the attack happened last month, but was largely unharmed. Running outside once the air had cleared, she found her husband severely wounded and her child’s body covered in blood.

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Global shortfall of nearly 1m midwives due to failure to value role, study finds

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Investing in midwifery could prevent two-thirds of maternal and newborn deaths, but investment and training are urgently needed

The world is facing a shortage of 900,000 midwives, with more than half the shortfall in Africa, where nearly two-thirds of maternal deaths occur, according to a new survey.

Insufficient resources and a failure to recognise the importance of the role mean there has been little progress since the last study in 2014, according to the State of the World’s Midwifery report, which looked at 194 countries.

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Lack of skin-to-skin care for small and premature babies hits survival rates

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Life-saving techniques fall out of favour on maternity wards in developing countries over Covid fears

Small and sick babies are at increased risk of dying due to disruptions in care caused by coronavirus, a survey of health workers across 62 mainly developing countries has found.

Every year, 2.5 million babies die within 28 days of birth, and more than 80% of them have low birth weight. A technique for premature and small babies known as kangaroo mother care (KMC), involving early prolonged skin-to-skin contact with their mothers and breastfeeding, can help reduce mortality.

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