The INFO Project Blog

We at the INFO Project continuously scan the news for womens-health innovations and news for our Pop Reporter newsletter and other products. Recently, there’s been a spat of reporting on the dismal state of maternal health worldwide, partly in anticipation of the worldwide summit Women Deliver, being held today through Saturday, October 20, in London. Health providers, ministers, and high-level delegates from 35 countries will join women’s rights advocates and senior UN officials to hear speakers, including Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), call for increased investments for health care for women, mothers and newborns.

“We know what is needed to save women from dying,” said Obaid in a statement to the Inter Press Service. ”Three simple interventions: Skilled birth attendants, emergency obstetric care, and family planning.”

Certainly, as the UNFPA’s Essan Niangoran pointed out yesterday in Gaborone, Botswana, maternal death is not only a leading cause of death and disability among women of reproductive age in Africa. ”It is an issue of social justice and human rights because most of these deaths are preventable,” he told Botswana’s Daily News.

Another intervention that could assist in alleviating some of the burden of maternal mortality and disability is addressing child marriage. Child Brides: Stolen Lives, a one-hour program from PBS’s award-winning newsmagazine NOW, is a gripping testimony to the urgency of stopping this harmful traditional practice.

Filmed on three continents, the program documents child marriage’s devastating impact on girls, families, communities, and nations. It aims to capture, as senior correspondent Maria Hinojosa says, “the quiet desperation of girls whose lives have already reached a turning point.”

Hinojosa travels to western Rajasthan to ask young Mamta what it was like to be married at seven years old. “I was small, there were lots of people,” she says, “they dressed me up but I didn’t know what was happening.” 

“Marriage is hell,” says a soft-spoken girl in Niger who, after being wed at 13, suffered a fistula after a prolonged labor of four days. “My parents forced me to get married. People were dancing with energy and joy, but I was crying.”

In 1994, the United Nations Committee on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) recommended that countries adopt a minimum age for marriage of 18 years for both sexes. However, according to the International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC), in most developing countries, between 20 and 70% of young women marry (or start living with a partner) before age 18.

NOW’s program is available online via streaming media, podcast or download.