Fissures in Reality: Followup: Maternal and Newborn Health

10 February 2009

Followup: Maternal and Newborn Health

I just want to send out a few more items that may be helpful to those of you interested in learning about maternal and newborn health. Let's start in the U.S. In my last post I gave you the link to UNICEF's State of the World's Children address, but the publication offers little information about maternal mortality in the U.S. We need information about domestic maternity care, because the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. is currently the worst it has been in decades. One resource that offers great information (from mothers' perspectives) about maternity and postpartum care is Childbirth Connection's New Mothers Speak Out Report. Click on the link to read more about childbirth in America.

Moving back to international issues of maternal and newborn health: This video made me smile. You can read more about this awareness-raising campaign at Oxfam UK's website.

Also, might I recommend this photo gallery?

1 comment:

Chris J. said...: Keep it coming. You're going to write this paper for me.; March 1, 2009 at 9:29 AM

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"My trip to the former Yugoslavia had opened the world for me, and my hunger for the world. In doing so, it undid the contained, safe borders of my existence. Suddenly a woman weeping over her lost son in an image on the front page of The New York Times was no longer a theoretical entity. She was real, a woman I might have met, might have known. I was connected to her. I could no longer divorce myself from her pain, her suffering. Initially this was overwhelming. I had nightmares. I felt restless and wrong in my comforting life in America. Everything seemed absurd and pointless. I came to understand why we block out the pain and atrocities of others. That pain, if we allow it to enter us, makes our lives impossible. It forces us to examine our own values and reality. It insists that we be responsible for others. It thrusts us into the messy world where there are no easy solutions or reasons, only struggles and questions. It creates great fissures in the landscape of our insulated, so-called safe reality. Fissures that, once split open, can never close again. It compels us to act."
(Eve Ensler)

"But in the end, there will still be a morning like this one, full of new light, and a distant voice will be heard, like a memory of before we became people. And the tones of a song will well up, the gentle lull of the first mother. This song, yes indeed, will be ours, the memory of a deep root that they were unable to wrench out of us. This voice will give us the strength for a new beginning, and upon hearing it, the corpses will find peace in their graves and the survivors will embrace life with the simple joy of young lovers. All this will happen if we are able to rid ourselves of this time that has made animals out of us. Let us strive to die like the people we no longer are."
(Mia Couto)

Fissures in Reality

10 February 2009

Followup: Maternal and Newborn Health

1 comment: