Working for Change 103
How to help save more childbearing women’s lives
Most deaths and injuries from pregnancy and birth could
be prevented through better nutrition, child spacing (with
family planning), access to safe abortion, good care during
pregnancy and birth, good transportation, and good blood
services. Here are some ways to help:
I am going to help
my wife have a
safe and healthy
pregnancy and birth.
• Learn the danger signs during pregnancy, birth, and after birth.
• Plan how to get help before it is needed.
• Try to organize your community so that emergency
transportation, money, and blood donations will be ready
when difficult births happen.
• Work with local leaders to build small houses near a hospital
where women from remote areas can stay until it is time to
give birth.
How health workers can help save women’s and children’s lives:
• Offer family planning services to prevent unsafe abortions
and to help women avoid having births too close together.
• Offer STI treatment and prevention to all women and girls
old enough to have children.
• Promote condom use, and other ways to have safer sex.
• Provide testing and treatment for HIV, including medicines
and other support to prevent HIV spreading to a baby during
pregnancy, birth, or breastfeeding.
• Make tetanus vaccines available to all women.
• Learn how to detect problems during pregnancy, birth, and
after birth.
• Refer women with problems in a pregnancy (now or in the
past) to a health center that has emergency transportation.
• Teach birth attendants and midwives how to prevent
infection and how to watch for and treat danger signs during
pregnancy and birth.
525
preventing infection
• Encourage all women to breastfeed for at least 2 years.
• Have a medicine box that includes:
- oxytocin, ergometrine, misoprostol, and local plants to
prevent and control severe bleeding after the birth.
- antibiotics to treat infection.
- equipment to do injections in the muscle (IM) and the vein (IV).
- medicines to treat eclampsia (see page 87).
- gloves or clean plastic bags.
- new razor blades.
- enema bag or can for rectal fluids.
484
medicines that can
save a woman’s life
Where Women Have No Doctor 2012