This column by Juan Mercado, in the Inquirer, is sobering:
"A stagnation in death rates for mothers is obscene. There is a critical need for legislation to address structural barriers, Ona added. These include: overhauling of laws on midwifery and other health professions as well as consolidating health systems for local governments. For universal health care, there is need to pass the reproductive health bill.
Local governments are where the action is. LGUs can reach where most victims cluster: remote upland barangays, coastal fishing villages, or city slums. Often ill-fed school dropouts, these women lack access to what is, at best, patchy health services.
“Giving midwives further training in life-saving skills could prevent up to 80 percent of maternal deaths.” These mothers have “no escape routes,” i.e. options that give them “quality information that would enable them to avoid unwanted pregnancies or space pregnancies, and plan families.”
Look a little closer. Only 6 out of 10 Filipino mothers deliver babies with properly trained birth attendants. In contrast, almost 99 percent of births in Thailand have medical personnel present. Out of every 100 Filipino doctors, 68 practice abroad. Over 164,000 nurses left for “those faraway places with strange-sounding names” over the past four decades. “A health care brain drain is strangling [public] hospitals.”
Underground abortionists account for 12 percent of maternal deaths. The University of the Philippines Population Institute estimates that 560,000 abortions are induced yearly. Only 90,000 mothers get postabortion care. In 2008, about half of 3.4 million pregnancies were unintended."
http://opinion.inquirer.net/32143/obscene-death-rattles
