Gulf | Yemen
Eight women die giving birth daily in Yemen
Eight women die giving birth in Yemen every day and 366 women die for every 100,000 live births, UN information services (IRIN ) quoted official statistics in Yemen as showing.
- Staff Report
- Published: 00:00 March 9, 2007
Dubai: Eight women die giving birth in Yemen every day and 366 women die for every 100,000 live births, UN information services (IRIN ) quoted official statistics in Yemen as showing.
Poverty, poor health services, illliteracy and early marriage are all factors behind the high mortality rate in Yemen, said Yemeni officials.
The Yemen's most recent Demographic, Maternal and Child Health Survey (DMCHS), conducted in 1997, showed that 48 per cent of women between the ages of 20 and 24 were married before the age of 18.
In the poorest 20 per cent of the population, 57 per cent of girls were married before 18 and even among the richest families more than 35 per cent were married early. Overall, 14 per cent were married before 15. Raising the age of marriage to 18 years old could drop the mortality rate drastically, activists believe.
Preventable
"We have made the proposal to the cabinet and we are now awaiting its approval," Fathia Mohammad, assistant secretary general of the SCMC, a government body, was quoted by IRIN as saying.
Maternal deaths occurred because of lack of access and non-availability of good reproductive health services, believed experts and approximately 75 per cent of maternal deaths are preventable, according to officials at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Yemen.
UNFPA says that 84 per cent of all births in Yemen take place at home and only 20 per cent of these births have trained attendants present. "There are also cases where a husband refuses to take his wife to hospital for delivery," IRIN quoted Fathia as saying, as they are unaware of the delivery risks or because they don't like their wives to give birth with the help of midwives.
In Yemen, doctors and health centres are not equally distributed. There is only one doctor per 10,000 people as doctors tend to be concentrated only in main cities, namely Sanaa, Aden and Taiz.
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