Poor access to health care endangers pregnant Mexican
women
By: Lucia Newman
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The mountains of Oaxaca are home to thousands of indigenous
Mexicans like Felipa, who has never seen a doctor and did not go to a hospital to deliver any of her five children, the youngest born
just two months ago.
"There's no money around here, there's no work," she said. "So
how can I think of going to a hospital to have a baby?"
The vast majority of indigenous women who come to Zaachila, a
small Oaxaca mountain town, to sell wood on Thursdays have their children at home. They have never had pre- or postnatal care,
even though health care in Mexico is supposed to be universal, the right of every citizen. As a result, every six hours a woman in
Mexico dies in labor or from other complications related to
pregnancy.
Poverty, and an acute shortage of health facilities where peasants need
them, are most to blame. One family who wanted to bring their baby to the doctor had to make the
trip from a remote mountain village eight hours away. That was too long a trek for one of their neighbors,
who recently died in childbirth.
"Her stomach became inflated, and when she died, she burst
inside. There was blood coming out of her mouth and her nose. There's no doctor nearby, that's why this happened," her neighbor
said.
Health authorities in Mexico are only just beginning to recognize
the astonishingly high maternal mortality rate as a major problem.
"This is extremely critical, and the main thing is that everyone
agrees that the problem should not exist, and that the necessary resources must be designated to prevent it," Jose Gomez de Leon
of the National Population Council said.
But Dr. Marcela Martinez, Zaachila's municipal president, is
skeptical. "The government makes a lot of promises that aren't kept," she said. "The money never arrives for health services,
because the corruption is horrible."
The former treasurer of Mexico's social security institution is under
arrest, accused of stealing $150 million of public health funds.
But even if the funds were not embezzled, they clearly are not
making it to Mexico's poorest women, the indigenous women who live in isolated areas. They risk their
lives every time they have a child, in the same way their ancestors did hundreds of years ago, as though
nothing in Mexico had changed.