YEMEN: Eight Women Die Giving
Birth Every Day
Photo:
IRIN |
Young Yemeni girls preparing
for marriage |
SANAA, 8 March 2007 (IRIN) - A radical
proposal by Yemen’s Supreme Council for Motherhood and Childhood (SCMC) to raise
the legal age of marriage to 18 could see the country’s high maternal mortality
rate drop drastically, its supporters say.
“We have made the proposal to
the cabinet and we are now awaiting its approval,” said Fathia Mohammed,
assistant secretary general of the SCMC, a government body.
Early
marriage combined with illiteracy, poor health services and poverty make Yemen’s
maternal mortality the highest in the Arab world, Yemeni officials and
specialists say.
Yemen’s most recent Demographic, Maternal and Child
Health Survey (DMCHS), conducted in 1997, showed that 48 percent of women
between the ages of 20 and 24 were married before the age of 18. In the poorest
20 percent of the population, 57 percent of girls were married before 18 and
even among the richest families more than 35 percent were married early.
Overall, 14 percent were married before 15.
Yemen’s Ministry of Health
estimates that eight women die every day during child birth and 366 women die
for every 100,000 live births. The situation is compounded by the fact that
Yemen’s fertility rate is one of the highest in the world, with an average of
seven children per woman. Health specialists project the country’s current 20
million population will reach 35 million in 2025.
Specialists have
singled out early marriage as one of the main causes of Yemen’s high rate of
maternal mortality. “When a girl is married at the age of 13 or 14, then she
becomes at risk of maternal death. This is very common in Yemen, especially in
rural areas,” said Fathia.
According to her, girls getting married at an
early age are not ready to give birth, because “a girl’s body is not matured and
developed at this stage, and this also leads not only to death, but also to
other complications such as haemorrhaging”.
Home births
Approximately 75 per cent of maternal deaths are preventable,
occurring because of a lack of access to - and availability of - high-quality
reproductive health services, said officials at the United Nations Population
Fund (UNFPA) in Yemen. UNFPA says that 84 per cent of all births in Yemen take
place at home and only 20 per cent of these births have trained attendants
present.
“There are also cases where a husband refuses to take his wife
to hospital for delivery,” Fathia said, as they are unaware of the delivery
risks or because they don't like their wives to give birth with the help of
mid-wives.
In Yemen, doctors and health centres are not equally
distributed. There is only one doctor per 10,000 people as doctors tend to be
concentrated only in main cities, namely Sana’a, Aden and Taiz.
“Health
services reach only 60 percent of the population,” Yahya al-Babeli, Senior
Health Advisor at the Basic Health Services Project, which is funded by USAID,
told IRIN. The project includes a free two-year course for midwives employed in
health institutions.
When a girl is married at the
age of 13 or 14, then she becomes at risk of maternal death. This is very
common in Yemen, especially in rural areas. |
Al-Babeli also criticised
the Ministry of Health for not employing more midwives. “There is a huge
reservoir of midwives, but the ministry of health has not hired them due to its
complicated administrative system,” he said.
According to al-Babeli, the
USAID project has trained 120 midwives over the past two years in Amran, Marib,
and Shabwa provinces. He added that it was necessary for there to be a large
number of trained midwives - even if they are not employed by the Ministry of
Health - to prevent women dying while giving birth.
“We will also aim to
train 500 midwives in those provinces, in addition to Saada and al-Jawf
provinces, where health indicators are very weak,” he
added.