Surgery rekindles hope for Indian tsunami mothers
NAGAPATTINAM, India - It’s the most
unlikely setting for hope—a dingy shack filled haphazardly with pots and pans,
surrounded by puddles of filthy water, overflowing drains and rain-soaked
furniture.
Its resident, Geetha, a fisherwoman living in
a camp for tsunami survivors in southern India, is five months pregnant.
She is the first survivor to conceive after
undergoing surgery to reverse her sterilisation in the hope of having children,
after daughters Jotika, 5, and Sosika, 3, were swept away by the sea last
year.
Her success story has rekindled the faith of
other couples desperate to become parents again and fill a void created by a
catastrophe that killed more than 231,000 people in a dozen Indian Ocean
nations, most of them women and children.
So far, more than 50 women have undergone the
surgery—called recanalisation—to reconnect their fallopian tubes and reverse
sterilisations carried out under a state-sponsored family planning programme
aimed at controlling India’s runaway population growth.
Although only four of them have conceived,
the possibility of giving birth again to overcome the loss of their boys and
girls, has seen dozens more registering for the surgery.
“I am overjoyed, but I will feel happier only
after I have a safe delivery,” said Geetha, 29, holding her stomach as she spoke
outside her shack in Nagapattinam, the main town on India’s worst affected
southeastern coast.
“We can never forget the two girls we lost
but the newborn will help reduce our sorrow,” she said. “If this turns out to be
a girl, we will name her after one of the girls we lost.”
Bhaskaran, her husband, is equally
nervous.
“We raised our girls with so much love and
affection and then lost them. So we don’t want to celebrate until the child is
born,” he said.
The Dec. 26 tsunami killed at least 6,065
people in Nagapattinam district in Tamil Nadu state, more than a third of them
children.
For families which lost all their offspring,
the need to have children again is a major part of rebuilding their lives,
voluntary groups and mental health experts said.
A fairly complicated surgical procedure,
recanalisation has a success rate of less than 50 percent in women in their
active reproductive years. Much also depends on the health and size of the
fallopian tubes, gynaecologists say.
Nevertheless, women like Anandi, Geetha’s
neighbour who lost all her three boys, are confident their prayers will be
answered.
“It’s been seven months since I was operated
on but we haven’t had any luck. But looking at Geetha, I am still very hopeful,”
Anandi, 26, said.
Besides causing sterilised couples to
consider recanalisation, the tsunami has given a general boost to pregnancies
among survivors in India and Indonesia, doctors said.
In Indonesia’s worst-hit Aceh region, many
survivors were eager to have babies but faced hurdles like trauma and poor
living conditions, said Dr. Brian Sripahastuti, UNICEF’s reproductive specialist
in Aceh.
“I predict that 3-6 months from now, there
will be a lot of babies born in barracks, though not generally in Aceh,”
Sripahastuti said, referring to the temporary wooden structures sheltering the
homeless.
In India’s Nagapattinam too, doctors said
they witnessed a slight increase in the number of pregnancies between February
and June when many young survivors got married.
“Sterilisations are rare now. Survivors say
they will consider it only after they have three or four children,” said Dr. P.
Seethala, a leading Nagapattinam gynaecologist.
With at least half of the recanalised women
unlikely to conceive, families will eventually have to consider adopting orphans
and the surgery may end up as temporary consolation, authorities and aid workers
said.
But many recanalised fisherwomen were
desperate to conceive again as they feared that their husbands might leave them
and marry younger women to produce offspring, Dr. Seethala said.
“Some fishermen want to use this as an
opportunity to dump their sterilised wives and marry again,” she said. “This is
proving to be traumatic for their wives and they want to conceive as soon as
they are recanalised.”