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In Veil of Tears, a 60-page colour booklet
launched today, IRIN brings you a unique collection of personal stories of loss
and courage in childbirth, as told by women, men and children from different
parts of
The
stories were originally recorded in local languages, Dari and Pashto, for IRIN Radio
broadcasts. Transcribed into English in Veil of Tears, they convey the
immediacy and intimacy of the interviews conducted by IRIN reporters, who
travelled in some cases for several days to reach the remotest villages in
The
testimonies in Veil of Tears offer some rarely reported perspectives on the
issue of maternal mortality and as a compilation tell much about the state of
today’s
The
interviewees in the booklet talk about the struggle to get enough nutritious
food to sustain a woman through pregnancy, and to feed their families on any
given day; they describe the awesome distances and terrain that separate people
living in the villages from the nearest health facility; they describe the lack
of proper roads and transport that may leave a donkey cart as the only option
to attempt a life-or-death journey with a pregnant wife or mother to a
hospital; they explain the cultural and social rules that might mean decisions
by men are made too late to save a woman and her baby.
Fact
Box |
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One in eight Afghan women
will probably die in childbirth |
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An Afghan woman is 225 times
more likely to die in childbirth than a woman in |
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Only 25% of Afghan births
are assisted by a skilled birth attendant |
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Fewer than 13,000 health
workers serve an Afghan population of 28 million |
For more, see IRIN’s regular
reporting on Afghanistan |
The
women in these stories speak out, and some describe brave efforts to educate
themselves against all the odds in order to fight for better reproductive
health services for other women.
The
Afghan government and its partners have made notable achievements, such as
increasing the number of health facilities in the country from 400 in 2001 to
1,755 in 2008, and developing midwifery training programmes, but huge
challenges remain to be tackled to make childbirth safer for Afghan women.
Veil of
Tears showcases some of the work of IRIN’s Kabul-based radio project, which
closed at the end of 2009 after six years of humanitarian radio production and journalistic
capacity building in
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