If anyone is interested in maternal and child health issues in the developing world, I highly recommend the movie, A Walk to Beautiful, which chronicles the stories of five Ethiopian women with obstetric fistula and their efforts to get treatment and heal themselves. It's moving, heartbreaking, and beautiful.
The producers were at the screening I went to last night. They talked about what it's like for these women, who often live a 6 hour to 2 day walk from the nearest hospital (and who don't even own a pair of shoes), may have become pregnant at the age of 12 or 13, and have no access to obstetrical assistance if they need it. Our healthcare system has its problems, but one of the stats. in Ethiopia is that they have 59 obstetricians and 1000 midwives for a population of over 78 million people in a country the size of France, Spain, and Portugal combined, and most of them are in big cities. One of the efforts being made now is to train midwives who will live in more rural areas. Here is a link to the hospital and foundation that treats these women. The woman who runs the hospital, Catherine Hamlin, has been working in Ethiopia since 1959, and the producers said that she is still doing surgeries every day at the hospital. The estimate is that 200,000-300,000 women suffer from these fistula in Ethiopia, and 2-3 million worldwide. The hospital in the film can only treat about 1500 of them a year, they are generally lost to follow-up, and because these women's dystocia often happens because they are tiny and have tiny pelvises, stillbirth, prolonged labor, and risk of getting another fistula is high the next time they get pregnant.
Anyway, I was very moved by this film and am so grateful to have shoes, running water, access to healthcare, and a pretty darned good chance to have a healthy baby and a good birth outcome.
The producers were at the screening I went to last night. They talked about what it's like for these women, who often live a 6 hour to 2 day walk from the nearest hospital (and who don't even own a pair of shoes), may have become pregnant at the age of 12 or 13, and have no access to obstetrical assistance if they need it. Our healthcare system has its problems, but one of the stats. in Ethiopia is that they have 59 obstetricians and 1000 midwives for a population of over 78 million people in a country the size of France, Spain, and Portugal combined, and most of them are in big cities. One of the efforts being made now is to train midwives who will live in more rural areas. Here is a link to the hospital and foundation that treats these women. The woman who runs the hospital, Catherine Hamlin, has been working in Ethiopia since 1959, and the producers said that she is still doing surgeries every day at the hospital. The estimate is that 200,000-300,000 women suffer from these fistula in Ethiopia, and 2-3 million worldwide. The hospital in the film can only treat about 1500 of them a year, they are generally lost to follow-up, and because these women's dystocia often happens because they are tiny and have tiny pelvises, stillbirth, prolonged labor, and risk of getting another fistula is high the next time they get pregnant.
Anyway, I was very moved by this film and am so grateful to have shoes, running water, access to healthcare, and a pretty darned good chance to have a healthy baby and a good birth outcome.
no kind of obstetric care I receive will lower my chances of developing a fistula-- I have Crohn's disease.
