WP,pg1: In Rebuilding Sudan, Birth Often Brings Suffering and Death

In Rebuilding Sudan, Birth Often Brings Suffering and Death

By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 4, 2005; Page A01


RUMBEK, Sudan -- The slender, exhausted woman in bed No. 6 was struggling for her life. A nurse had warned Bang Akok last year, and the year before that, to stop getting pregnant. But the pressure to have another child was just too great.

Even at age 23, even after eight other pregnancies, even after she almost died from hemorrhaging during her previous delivery, Akok could not resist the overwhelming demands from her family and her society -- trying to rebuild after 21 years of civil war -- to help replace those lost during fighting.

Now, hours after giving birth again, Akok was dehydrated and suffering from internal bleeding. This time, she had been pregnant with twins. One of her babies -- a boy -- died before he could be delivered and had to be cut from her womb. His sister survived and was napping by her mother's side, with a head full of brown hair....

***

In a continent with some of the world's highest rates of infant and maternal mortality, southern Sudan is a pocket of especially harsh suffering and poor survival odds for pregnant women and their newborns. Here at Rumbek Hospital's maternity ward -- the only one for hundreds of miles -- less than half of the pregnancies and births result in both a living mother and baby.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, women face a 1 in 16 chance of dying from pregnancy and childbirth, which have outpaced AIDS-related diseases as the leading causes of death for women, according to the World Health Organization. In the developed world, less than 1 in 2,800 pregnant women face the same fate. Babies also die at extremely high rates in this part of the world, with more than 100 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared with 34 in East Asia, 30 in Latin America and 6 in industrialized countries....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5457-2005Mar3.html?sub=AR

I mean, you want to see how humans survive when pushed to their biological limits, read this article. The hard, cold facts of how the species survived in spite of horrific conditions relative to what we call "civilization" today.