ABOUT THE ISSUE
Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s deadliest place to give birth. Each year over a quarter of a million women die in childbirth in the region. But Mozambique is combating high maternal death rates by implementing unconventional programs.
After the country declared its independence from 400 years of Portuguese rule in 1975, a civil war raged for 16 years, killing a million people and wrecking the country’s infrastructure. By the time the war ended in 1992, the health care system was devastated and one in ten women were dying in childbirth. There were only 18 obstetricians for a population of 19 million. Since then, Mozambique has cut the maternal death rate in half.
As the figures now stand, the country is one of the few countries on track to achieve the fifth United Nations Millennium Development goal to reduce the maternal death rate by 75 percent by 2015. In 2004, Mozambique introduced a new health care initiative to train midwives in emergency obstetric care in an attempt to guarantee access to quality medical care during pregnancy and childbirth.
ABOUT THE FILM
The film Birth of a Surgeon follows Emilia Cumbane, one of the first midwives-in-training. She performs Cesareans and hysterectomies in makeshift operating rooms in rural Mozambique. We follow Cumbane from her home in the Mozambican capital Maputo, into intensive medical classes, through night shifts in the delivery wards, and watch as she fights for recognition of her surgical competence.
With more than half a million women dying in pregnancy or childbirth worldwide, Mozambique’s surgical training programs are being hailed as a model solution in confronting the maternal health crisis facing developing countries. The film captures one woman’s story on the frontlines of improving maternal mortality but it also demonstrates how low-cost, community-based health initiatives are changing the face of public health in Africa.
“I like to be a midwife,” Cumbane says. “I think it’s a good profession - to produce people.”
The first class of almost 30 surgical midwives trained in delivery techniques and advanced surgery graduate in July 2008.
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07/09/2008 :: 12:18:41 AM
Francesca Pagan Says:
Fantastic! Mozambique is leading the world in the reduction of meternal death rates and leadign the way in trainig midwives recieve. Watch out big shot Doctors … a movement to replace you with cost effective, hands-on, nurtuting care is in motion. This first class of surgerically trained midwives will increase the pressure OB/GYNs are feeling about being replaced. I think this is a good thing, because OB/GYNs have to realize that women want to be CARED for, not marginalized to feel as if they are physicallt incapable of birthing a child without the medicalization and intervention of a “professional” to show her body how to proceed through labor. Maternal care is to be Mother-focused, and midwives have practiced as such for centuries. It is a wonderful time for the science of midwifery and I’m hopeful to see an increase of them in the US as well as the rest of the world. Mozambique has taken the crises of too few doctors and too little money to get them from elsewhere, and come up with a solution that returns midwivery to the status if tradtionally held, as the best, safest and most desired way for women to safely and lovingly deliver their babies into the world. Carry on!