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Making our mothers proud
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Today, Friday, is the final day of the G8 Summit in L’Aquila, Italy. On the agenda for the high-profile annual gathering were a number of issues, including the economic crisis, climate change and Third World development. In the days and weeks leading up to the summit, a campaign has been launched to ensure the inclusion of another very important issue on the agenda: maternal mortality.
The White Ribbon Alliance, a global organization committed to reducing the number of women who die in childbirth every year, has put together a “family photo album,” featuring snapshots of the leaders of each of the G8 countries with their mothers. Urging the leaders to “make their mothers proud,” the WRA is hoping that this year, UN Millennium Resolution 5, which aims “to reduce maternal mortality by 75 percent and to achieve universal access to reproductive health services by 2015,” will receive more attention than it has in the past.
According to the WRA, this resolution has made the least progress of any UNMR, with maternal mortality decreasing by only 1% per year since 1990. If we want to reach our target by 2015, the rate needs to be more than 5% per year.
The ad campaign is a touching and inventive approach to demanding action from our leaders. By appealing to these seven men and one woman to consider the significance of their relationships with their own mothers, the campaign translates the statistic of 536, 000 maternal deaths per year into human terms. After all, for the families who lose a mother, a sister, an aunt, a wife in childbirth, the numbers are not abstractions. For women who risk death every time they create life, the possibility of dying is not a statistic, but a frightening reality.
The campaign is certainly novel. Whether it will be effective remains to be seen. Currently, a woman’s chance of dying in childbirth in the United States is 1 in 4, 800. In Niger it’s 1 in 7. Though it’s our elected leaders who have the power to effect sweeping, systemic change to improve those statistics, there are things we as citizens can do, too. You can donate to the White Ribbon Alliance. You can write to President Obama and urge him to take action on this issue. Or you can give money to one of the local projects – in Tanzania, Nicaragua, Haiti, Ethiopia, Nigeria, the Palestinian Territories, Pakistan - that work to end the tragedy of maternal mortality, one mother at a time.
Through Global Giving, you can give any sum of money, large or small, to these projects. In Nigeria, a $10 donation buys five doses of misoprostol, a drug that stops postpartum hemorrhages, a common cause of maternal mortality. The same sum trains a traditional midwife to administer the drug, allowing her to save potentially dozens, even hundreds of lives. Money can be given in a person's name, or in their memory, and a donation makes a special and meaningful gift. These are the kinds of small, yet hugely important actions that we as citizens of the world can take to solve a problem that, in this age of heroic medicine and breathtaking technology, ought not to be allowed to claim hundreds of thousands of lives every year.
I sincerely hope this week, as we think about the small scale actions that we can take, as we think about the effect one maternal death has on a family or a village, that our leaders are giving serious thought to the effect that millions of maternal deaths have on states and on nations. And I hope that they'll be compelled to do something, to take action, to move closer to our goal of reducing maternal mortality by a daunting 75%. Our leaders have been urged to make their mothers proud, but this week in L'Aquila they also have the chance to make their nations proud, and I hope with all my heart that they do.
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