For my final project I decided to learn more about the effects of educating women on maternal mortality in India using a the critical medical anthropological approach. I decided to do this topic because after reading last week’s material on the different types of births and how one or the other has advantages and disadvantages, I was very interested in the number of deaths for mothers during pregnancy. I believe this topic is very important, especially in India, because maternal mortality rates are very high in Asia compared to North America. In fact, WHO reported that about 88-98% of maternal deaths could have been prevented with proper care and handling during the delivery process (Prakash, Swain, and Seth, 1991). Moreover, Prakash, Swain, and Seth (1991) believed that an effective strategy to reduce maternal mortality rates was to educate young girls on health and sex and to educate the country on maternal health care. This is because women understand their own body better than anyone else does and they will be able to finally prioritize their own gender for once by taking care of mothers during pregnancy.
From a cultural standpoint, maternal mortality in India is very important to address because of the way inequality for women in this country can easily prevent these drastic mortality rates. While the education of doctors can be spent on prenatal and postnatal care for women, their resources are spent on other things that do not pertain to this concern in India. Moreover, many large scale observation studies to are not often spent on antenatal, natal, and postnatal care in India to assess the quality of care in this area of medicine (Kumar, 2010). In addition, maternal deaths have been found to occur in poor families with minimal facilities. In fact, Kumar (2010) concluded that 80% of maternal deaths occurred in families who lived in poverty and 61% of mothers that died were in the lower caste. Additionally, mothers in the lowest socioeconomic class had about two and a half times higher mortality rate than mothers in the higher classes (UNICEF). This proves that maternal mortality rates is just as much as a social and cultural problem, as well as a health issue.
In terms of public health, this topic is very important because if left unchecked, it can impact the lives of so many mothers in India. Out of the 536,000 maternal deaths that occur each year around the globe, about 136,000 occur in India (Vora et al., 2009). The Indian government has been making so many efforts over the past decade to improve maternal mortality rates, but it has been unsuccessful so far. Therefore, the fact that it is still a huge problem for women in India makes it a huge public health issue. Additionally, there is a delay in the public health system that has been linked to women who die in childbirth. This delay occurs when a women is at a healthcare facility and is unable to been seen by a medical professional immediately (Kumar, 2010). For example, the time taken to receive transport to a hospital in some rural areas of India was about 4-5 hours, but a women who has a postpartum hemorrhage would only survive for 2 hours (Kumar, 2010).
Works cited
Kumar, S. (2010). Reducing maternal mortality in India: Policy, equity, and quality issues. Indian Journal of Public Health, 54(2), 57.
Maternal Health. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://unicef.in/whatwedo/1/maternal-health
Prakash, A., Swain, S., & Seth, A. (1991). Maternal mortality in India: Current status and strategies for reduction. Indian Pediatrics, 28(12), 1395-1400.
Vora, K. S., Mavalankar, D. V., Ramani, K. V., Upadhyaya, M., Sharma, B., Iyengar, S., … Iyengar, K. (2009). Maternal health situation in India: a case study. Journal of health, population, and nutrition, 27(2), 184–201. doi:10.3329/jhpn.v27i2.3363