The right to life is the right on which all other rights are dependent. It poses on the State an duty not only to keep from damaging or killing people, but also to advance conditions necessary for survival.
Women are not dying from disorders we can’t find treatment to. …They are dying because communities have yet to decide that their lives are worth keeping.” Mahmoud Fathallah, past-president of the International Federation of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
According to My Canadian Pharmacy, 99% of maternal deaths appear in countries which are developing, where poverty and lack in infrastructure can endanger survival. In many of countries where women and their babies die bacause of childbirth, health of women and life is proved to be literally worth less than men’s, with dramatically outcomes for women. The women’s right to life promotion in maternity care context demands full range of women’s social, economic, and political outcomes consideration.
African-American females are 3-4 times more likely to die during childbirth in the USA in comparison with general population. What does this statistical data mean about Black women’s right to survive in the USA? To be maintained around reproduction? How is this statistical data a heritage of severities of childbirth in slavery, when African-American women were openly refused the right to life? What are the avenues through which African-American women’s right to live proceeds to be refused around childbirth today? HRiC maintains the cooperation of people collaborating at both grass roots and policy levels to give responses to those questions and find solutions.
Who is looking out for the baby?
Opponency to women’s strains to practice the right to aware agreement and refusal in childbirth are usually trained in unborn’s right to life assertion. When caregivers or lawmakers try to confine women’s healthcare choices around childbirth—like the choice to reject cesarean section, or the choice to give birth at home with a wise woman — they often discuss that birthing women don’t have the right to choose what “put their baby at risk.”
From a legal perspective, these statements are troublesome. Every person obtains the right to deny medical procedures, even if they the procedure (for example, an organ donation) might save another person’s life. It is a disturbance of the birthing woman’s bodily sincerity to push her to submit to undesired medical treatment, even if doing so would save the baby’s life.
More significant, decision-making reality in childbirth is rarely so understandable. Every decision includes complex of short and long term risks and advantages. Nobody can warrant a “good result” from a made decision, and stillbirth appears sometimes, no matter who is under control. Someone must weigh the genuine risks and advantages of the decisions in birth, and have the final word in those decisions. That person must be the mother. An unborn baby is represented by the person who is most invested in its health and well-being. Nobody is more invested in the health and well-being of a being-born baby than the person who grew it under her heart, from her blood. The maternal-fetal dyad is best protected when the birthing mother is respected as a competent decision-maker for herself and her child.
Laws that confine women’s reproductive possibilities don’t alert their choices, but they do enhance their risk of dying from those choices. Some women will decide to give birth at home, whether or not their healthcare system maintains that choice as legitimate. When that choice is disregarded or driven underground, continuity of care is underestimated, with predictably dramatically outcomes for women and babies. Reproductive healthcare tries to maximize security and survival when it serves to maintain women, instead of tale them under control.