Maternal healthcare is collective responsibility

Motherhood is a blessing. Motherhood is beautiful. Motherhood is an experience. Motherhood is fulfilling. Motherhood is satisfying. Motherhood is a woman's ultimate purpose in life. It is what every woman dreams of, wishes for and lives for. It is, therefore, unacceptable that a woman's life should end while keeping a charge nature has bestowed on her, while executing her reproductive right. A woman's life must not be taken in the process of giving life.

As the fight against maternal mortality seems to take a positive outlook worldwide, Ghana's attempts to reduce the staggering maternal mortality figures seem not to be yielding the desired results. Contrary to World Health Organisation's (WHO) recent report on maternal health; “Trends in maternal health: 1990-2013” that maternal mortality has fallen worldwide; Ghana's maternal mortality has seen an alarming increase in recent years.


Ghana, in the year 2000, joined some 187 countries from across the world to sign the Millennium Declaration to reduce poverty by 2015. Eight goals, known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), were drawn from the Millennium Declaration, and that included a three-quarters reduction in maternal mortality and an overall improved maternal healthcare. Goal 5 aimed at reducing maternal mortality to 185 per 100,000 live births by 2015.


Currently, according to the WHO report, Ghana's Maternal Mortality Ratio/ Rate (MMR) stands at 380 per 100,000 and the Ghana Health Service (GHS) hopes it will take a downward trend to 340 per 100,000 live births by 2015. It is, therefore, clear that the country will fall short of the MDG5 despite the various interventions put in place by the government of Ghana.


What we miss however, is the fact that various factors brew themselves together to give us the finished product known as maternal mortality. Whenever maternal health is referred to, expects tend to define it as the health of women during pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum (after birth) period. But it also includes a woman's sexual reproductive health and choices.


The underpowered Ghanaian woman


Many women in this country face many challenges when it comes to their reproductive health and that goes a long way to affect them during their pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum period, sometimes leading to their deaths. These challenges include illiteracy, ignorance, financial constraints and cultural or religious oppressions, ineffective and inadequate government interventions. A few women in Ghana know their reproductive rights and therefore are able to make such reproductive choices such as family planning, safe contraceptive usage and even the years within which she must give birth. The high illiteracy rates among most women in Ghana affect their choices in reproductive health. This lack of illiteracy affects women's ability to access skilled labour which in turn affects their financial independence. Many of these women must therefore depend on their husbands for financial support, hence preventing them from getting early medical attention when they are pregnant. Societal norms and cultural practices also accounts for a woman's failure to fully exercise and enjoy her reproductive and maternal health rights.

Collective responsibility


Ensuring an improved maternal health must begin with the conscience that a woman's reproductive choices to pregnancy through to child birth and postpartum is not just the responsibility of the woman and to some extent her family, but a collective one which involves the government, community and all.


The government apart from ensuring that all its intervention policies on maternal health are being run efficiently, it also must ensure that it disburses the right amount of allocations to the various ministries that are one way or the other linked to an improved maternal healthcare. Many a times, the Ministry of Health is considered as the ministry involved in ensuring that Ghanaian women enjoy their reproductive rights and safe motherhood.


But the Ministries of Roads and Highways; Lands, Water and Natural Resources; Local Government; and Education have roles to play as well. What will be the benefit after the Ministry of Health have provided the highly skilled staff, state-of the-art health equipment and there is no safe drinking water for a pregnant woman to drink, no good road network to transport her in case of a referral or no educated leaders or members of the community; the woman included; who do not know their various rights and roles in reproductive and maternal health.


Government must also ensure that interventions put in place to curb the situation of maternal mortality is sustainable by coming up with innovative ideas of increasing the funds that are pumped into these interventions and sealing leakages found in them.