Dear Editor,
The maternal deaths article in SN of October 21 was not properly investigated. In every country there is a legal and moral obligation on the part of government to protect its women by ensuring that they are provided with quality health care, especially when pregnant. Their lives and the lives of their babies must be preserved. Pregnant women must be protected and given the necessary care, as they are the carriers and bearers of the future.
Guyana is still a developing country with a population of less than a million people. There are six billion people in this world. It is extremely reckless, unreasonable, wicked and unsubstantiated to use the general worldwide maternal mortality rate of 2008 in such a careless way, as to insinuate that Guyana is a significant contributor to that rate. The health care system in Guyana is not the best in the world and neither is it the best in the Caribbean, but Guyana has made momentous improvements in its healthcare system and facilities.
In fact, while the international maternal mortality rate is indeed alarming, according to World Bank Indicators, the United States maternal mortality rate in 2008 was 24 per 100,000 live births, that is, 2.4 per 10,000 live births. Guyana’s maternal mortality rate in 2008, which was 27 per 100,000 live births, is only 2.7 per 10,000 live births, slightly trailing the US, compared to three other premier Caribbean destinations – Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Barbados – all of which individually, are more than double those of Guyana and the United States. The figures that follow should give this writer and the Guyanese population, a clear understanding of the flaws and inaccuracies of their not too carefully investigated article on maternal deaths: Trinidad and Tobago – 55 per 100,000 live births, ie, (5.5 per 10,000); Jamaica – 64 per 100,000 live births, ie, (6.4 per 10,000) and Barbados – 89 per 100,000 live births, ie, (8.9 per 10,000).
It is truly distressing to fathom why any woman blessed with the gift of bringing into the world another human life should have to lose her own in the process. This loss is tragic and avoidable, and in cases like those of Esther Dwarka-Bowlin and Yogeeta Bisram, it is shameful that trained nurses and hospital personnel would allow this to happen. (My heart goes out to the families of these women.) But it is most reckless of this journalist to write and publish such hastily generalized assumptions which are entirely based on sweeping conclusions. So the next time this journalist is burdened with the overwhelming task of properly investigating and reporting facts of such a sensitive and important issue, I can only hope that she/he considers how important it is to practise responsible journalism.
Yours faithfully,
Rachael Bakker
Editor’s note
While Ms Bakker refers to an “article” in this newspaper on October 21concerning maternal deaths – there were two on that date – one can only presume from the content of her letter that in fact she means the editorial which appeared at the same time. Editorials are opinion pieces, not reports, investigative or otherwise, and in this instance the examples of maternal deaths in Berbice derived from stories we had already published, to which Ms Bakker had raised no earlier objection.
In the case of the document ‘Trends in Maternal Mortality’ (2008) released by the World Health Organization et al cited in the editorial, no specific figures were quoted either for this country, the US or any Caribbean territory. The only ones which the leader gave related to the overall world figure. It is Ms Bakker who makes the comparisons between this country and others, supposedly using figures from the same report. Unfortunately, however, in so doing she has in part either confused the numbers or got them altogether wrong. The US figure of 24 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births which she gives is accurate, as is the figure of 55 for Trinidad and Tobago. Barbados, however, is not listed as having 89 maternal deaths per 100,000; the correct number is 64. It is Jamaica which has the 89 maternal deaths. As for Guyana, Ms Bakker has omitted a zero; the figure is not 27 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, but 270. Her conclusion that the three Caribbean territories she mentions had maternal death rates more than double that of Guyana is therefore completely erroneous; the reverse is the case.
