Maternal Wellness in India

India, Where to start? When you first enter India you get overwhelmed by everything you see. There is so much to see and the longer your there the more you see. It’s a huge country, but within the country you see so many differences.

Drive for like an hour and every 15 minutes it feels like you are somewhere else. That’s what I would say the beauty of India. It is so diverse. It has literally everything. From mountains with snow, to beautiful nature, to beaches, to inland, native culteres, undiscovered places and name it and you’ll find it here.

With all that beauty you also find a country filled with contradictions. Rich and poor lives here very closely next to each other which makes the differences even more visible.

A big problem here is maternal health. Where in my previous blog I already gave my opinion about what maternal health should be, here in India is still a lot of improvement to be done. Though the country is already on the right path, The Maternal Mortality Ratio – the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births – reduced from 212 in 2007 to 167 in 2013. There is still some room for improvements.

20% of the women who die everyday due to pregnancy and childbirth related causes are from India. And mothers in the lowest incomes have about 2,5 times more chance to die then mothers in the higher incomes.

Now how can we improve these numbers?

First step by all working together. It doesn’t matter how small the contribution is or in what form your contribution is, every contribution helps towards better maternal health, so if we all work together we can keep reducing the maternal mortality rate.

Second; we should make all births wanted and safe. That means women should be able to have acces to family planning and contraceptives.

Third; All births should be attented by trained professional health care workers to reduce the risks of things going wrong and not being able to be solved.

Fourth; there should be a better infrastructure. All women should have acces to quality healthcare 24/7. And should have acces to a network around them to rely on.

Fifth; Education. It all starts with knowledge. What is normal and what is not normal? What is necessary and what not?

With these points we can all together improve the maternal health in India. And isn’t that something we all want? Because how important is it to have a safe start in life? If you don’t have a good start in life you are already 10 steps behind. So lets join hands and all work together for this noble cause!