The Miracle of Birth

Not yesterdays newborn, but a glorious one nonetheless

Today I’m going to talk to you about the miracle of birth. Well, I don’t actually believe in miracles, but I do think that human reproduction is pretty spectacular. Yesterday I was lucky enough (right choice of words?) to watch a woman here at the Clinic give birth. This is the first (human) birth I’ve seen and it was rather incredible. I did watch a dog squeeze out 11 puppies on my door step last year, but that's not quite the same. I’m so amazed by the concept of reproduction at all that I have to say a big kudos to evolution for sorting out our bodies to enable us to not only grow another human being inside our bellies, but then to squeeze it out as well. And the fact that we are so well evolved that, if needs be, we can do the whole birthing thing on our own, wow. Just wow.

Now, I’m sure I don’t need to go into details here, it was a pretty gross experience, but nowhere near as messy as I had expected, and I have to admit, I was surprised by one or two of the routine things that happen, I thought I knew all about what goes on, but it turns out you learn something new everyday. The mama was a 21 year old Burmese woman, and this was her second child (a little girl by the way, with lots of hair). Anyways, it's been about 9 years since there was a time when someone I know wasn't preggas, and I now have a whole new level of respect for all my amazing friends that have had kids. You guys did good. Real good. 

I am currently writing the 2011 Annual Report for the Clinic, so I thought I’d share some interesting information about our incredible Reproductive Health department here:

Maternal mortality rates are over 1,000 per 100,000 live births in the Eastern Burma conflict zones. This compares to 360 in the rest of Burma and 44 per 100,000 live births in Thailand. This demonstrates the huge need for the safe, free services provided by the MTC reproductive health department.

The department delivers between 3 – 15 babies every day, with the average usually being 7. We offer comprehensive short and long term contraception options for women, including condoms, oral contraceptives, hormonal injections, 3-year hormonal implants, IUD’s and referrals to Mae Sot Hospital for tubal ligation procedures. Our data illustrates that we are now seeing a decrease in the ratio of post-abortion care patients : deliveries. We believe this is a result of our contraception programmes – when given the choice about when and if to have children, women often choose to prevent pregnancies. As a result, fewer unplanned and unwanted pregnancies reduce the incidence of unsafe abortion.

There are many challenges in the RH departments, including an increasing number of premature and low birth weight babies being born. This, in turn, puts pressure on our neonatal unit, which only has the capacity to appropriately care for a small number of premature babies; closely related to this issue is the fact that these babies need to be admitted to the neonatal unit for significant periods of time, hindering the availability of space for new arrivals. The equipment available in the neonatal unit is severely lacking: the department only has two incubators for premature infants; however there are always more than two premature or low birth weight babies at the same time. Four RH-IPD staff have been trained as ultrasound technicians and are able to provide more accurate assessments for women during pregnancy and labour, thus being able to diagnose and reduce many risks faced by a large number of women.

I've seen this every day for a year and I still don't really get the message - use a new one every day, or wash after use so you can use them again next week?

This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the department goes, we also do a lot to combat the spread of HIV from mother to child for example. So if you’re interested in learning more, check out our RH webpage.

Yay for mama's!