In Iraq, giving birth is complicated by war

[Rose Siding]

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Like her newly democratic homeland, Khanim has dealt with major birth pains the last few years. After the 2003 war that toppled Saddam Hussein, the number of women who gave birth at home shot up to about two-thirds. Of those, 80 percent had nobody with any formal training present at the birth. Far from lifesaving emergency care, many mothers died from preventable complications.

Today, nobody knows exactly how many mothers are dying in Iraq. Violence has prevented medical experts from measuring the maternal mortality rate since late 2003, when the number of Iraqi women who died from childbirth climbed to 370 per 100,000 - triple its 1990 rates and 31 times the US rate of 12. The UN Population Fund concluded that the war and its aftermath had made an old problem "suddenly become very much worse."
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Until Iraq stabilizes, there's another way to save mothers' lives. But it requires acknowledging home delivery, at the risk of encouraging it. This means using birth assistants like Khanim. But without proper training and close regulation, birth assistants can unwittingly endanger their patients. If a mother has potential complications or if it's a woman's first child, birth assistants and midwives are supposed to send her to a hospital. Often, they don't.

Shler Faiq Ghreeb, a doctor, sees the results firsthand: Once or twice a month, women arrive in Sulaymaniyah's maternity hospital sick or dying because they gave birth at home when they shouldn't have. Iraq's health ministry plans to stop training birth assistants. (The ministry failed to respond to several requests for comment on this article.)

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0630/p07s02-woiq.html