Youth leaders attend workshop on maternal mortality
Martenal mortality refers to the death of a woman which is related to pregnancy or childbirth. Maternal deaths are much more common in developing countries. Many maternal deaths result from abortions which mothers attempt themselves.
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Some examples of conditions that can cause maternal death are severe bleeding, also known as hemorrhage (mostly bleeding after childbirth), infections (usually after childbirth), high blood pressure during pregnancy (pre-eclampsia and eclampsia), complications from delivery and unsafe abortion.
Maternal mortality is higher in women living in rural areas and among poorer communities, with young adolescents facing a higher risk of complications and death as a result of pregnancy than older women.
Skilled care before, during and after childbirth can save the lives of women and newborn babies.
The Ejisu/Juaben Municipal Assembly, with sponsorship from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), has organised a day’s workshop on maternal mortality for leaders of youth groups at Ejisu, near Kumasi in the Ashanti Region, as part of a sexual health education programme being undertaken by the assembly to help reduce maternal mortality rates in the municipal.
Addressing the workshop, the Ejisu-Juaben Head of the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (DOVVSU) of the Ghana Police Service, Chief Inspector Charlotte Arko, said the physical and emotional abuse of women posed a major challenge to the fight against maternal mortality.
She explained that bodily attacks and emotional abuse of women before or during pregnancy affected their health and sometimes led to complications during labour, and mentioned that some forms of emotional abuse that affected the health of mothers included verbal abuse, locking up women in rooms, destroying their income-generating activities, starving them and disgracing them in public, as well as the refusal of husbands to communicate with their wives.
Who can report?
Ms Arko also encouraged non-relatives of domestic violence victims to report acts of abuse in the domestic setting to the police, and assured that even if they did not want to be the complainant, the police could treat them as informants and institute investigations to bring perpetrators to book based on the information available to them.
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She noted that women were not the only people at the receiving end of domestic violence, since, according to her, some women also subject their partners to all kinds of violent abuses, and for that reason the unit did not discriminate in taking action on the basis of sex when cases were reported to them.
Child Abuse
Touching on child abuse, Ms Arko pointed out that some children, who were sexually abused, developed medical conditions which affected their health during pregnancy and labour at later years, and called for sustained efforts to deal with the menace.
The Ejisu-Juaben Municipal Planning Officer, Mr Colins Ohene Gyan, expressed worry that maternal mortality and sexual health issues had been relegated to the background, and said contrary to perceptions, issues related to maternal mortality had a great impact on the development of any society, since the death of mothers and children at birth affected the human resource development of that society.