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Deadly Pregnancies in India
Why do women continue to die needlessly? One reason is that so little is done to monitor how well health programs are implemented. The Indian government has identified maternal health as a key priority and developed programs to provide health care to pregnant women in rural areas. But as Human Rights Watch discovered, India has failed to oversee these programs in a manner that would allow the government to identify and correct deficiencies in unsuccessful programs—and replicate the methods of successful ones. In Uttar Pradesh, for example, Human Rights Watch documented how women die because of poor referral systems; time and again, we were told that women were referred to health facilities that could not provide them with adequate care. Many of these women then died while trying to reach a hospital or clinic that could provide life-saving treatment.
One important step toward a more effective response to maternal mortality is to give families an officially sanctioned way to complain about ineffective treatment. The goal should be to identify whether particular individuals or institutions are at fault for harm caused to women seeking maternal health care, to provide appropriate compensation to victims, and to spur corrective action. The inquiry should also look beyond individual actions of health-care providers to whether the state has established sufficient oversight of local programs.
Such accountability may seem abstract, but it can be the difference between life and death for pregnant women in India and around the world. Without it, the goal of dramatically reducing maternal deaths by 2015 is not likely to be met, and women will continue to needlessly die.
Kenneth Roth is the executive director of Human Rights Watch.
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Kenneth Roth has been executive director of Human Rights Watch since 1993. Before joining HRW as deputy director in 1987, he was a federal prosecutor for both the US attorney's office for the Southern District of New York and the Iran-Contra investigation in Washington.
Jaime-Alexis
Maternal mortality is indeed a major issue around the world. One woman dies every minute during pregnancy or childbirth. The organization for which I work, Pathfinder International, has a range of innovative programs using new technologies to save women's lives. We have a postpartum hemorrhage project in Nigeria, India, Bangladesh, and Peru utilizing the non-pneumatic anti-shock garment which can be seen here: http://www.pathfind.org/Video_Nigeria_Aisha2009. For those interested in addressing this critical issue, I encourage you to check out Pathfinder.
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