Word: childbirth
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Some version of that scene is repeated around the world about once a minute. Death in childbirth is not just something you find in a Victorian novel. Every year, about 536,000 women die giving birth. In some poor nations, dying in childbirth is so common that almost everyone has known a victim. Take Sierra Leone, a West African nation with just 6.3 million people: women there have a 1 in 8 chance of dying in childbirth during their lifetime. The same miserable odds apply in Afghanistan. In the U.S., by contrast, the lifetime chance that a woman will...
...treat deadly postpartum bleeding and pregnancy-related anemia. But in many places, such gains are dwarfed by a multitude of problems: scattershot care, low pay for health workers and a scarcity of midwives and doctors. In Mozambique, where women have a 1 in 45 lifetime chance of dying in childbirth, there are just 3 doctors per 100,000 people; in all of Sierra Leone, there are 64 government doctors, only five of whom are gynecologists. Millions of families have never seen a doctor or nurse and give birth at home with traditional birthing helpers, while those who make...
...lack the political will--as well as the money--to tackle the issue, perhaps because there are too few women politicians to push it. Monir Islam, director of the maternal-health program of the World Health Organization in Geneva, calls governments' low level of investment in reducing deaths in childbirth a "sinful neglect...
...children now attend school and sleep under mosquito nets; thousands of new water wells have been dug. Yet though maternal health care underpins many other development goals (healthy mothers are more likely to ensure that their children are well fed and educated), the total number of women dying in childbirth has remained virtually unchanged in eight years...
...factors that increased the risk of incontinence, the study found, were obesity and childbirth. Although the odds of suffering a pelvic-floor disorder were lower for thin women who had not been pregnant, there is no way to avoid the risk altogether, Nygaard says. But there are few simple things women can do to lower risk, including changing two common habits. For one thing, Nygaard says, she sees too many of her patients lugging around one-liter bottles of water. This trend makes it more likely that women will drink too much water, leading to what doctors call urge incontinence...