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Moroccan moms benefit from maternal health revolution
– Reported, June 11, 2013
Seven months pregnant, she sat patiently, wearing a brown djellaba, a long robe with a hood, embroidered in orange and a matching orange hijab to cover her hair. About 10 other women sat alongside Boudraa in the blue and white waiting area outside the nurses examination room. She was expecting the birth of her first child.
Across the street from the clinic lies one of the areas many slums, where Boudraa lives. That afternoon kids played in a dirt field in front of the shanty towns entrance, strewn with garbage and rocks, kicking more dirt into the already dusty air. Cows ate out of a dumpster, while donkeys and roosters roamed the field. Makeshift homes, connected with zigzagging clothes lines, were in the background. Satellite dishes protruded from many of the tin roofs.
Boudraa was at the clinic to get a vaccine, although she couldnt say for what. All she knew was that it was supposed to keep her healthy for her pregnancy, during which time shed regularly visited a doctor. She hoped a nurse would see her in 30 minutes.
Seventeen-year-old Boudraa is among the fortunate women benefiting from her nations commitment to lowering the number of women who die in childbirth.
By 2010 Morocco had decreased its maternal mortality ratio by over 60 percent since 1990, according to the Ministry of Health, with much of that drop in recent years. And between 1990 and 2008 it achieved an annualized decline of 6.3 percent, the fastest in the region with the exception for Irans 8.9 percent, according to a 2011 report by the Ministry of Health and the United Nations Population Fund.
This progress means Morocco might meet U.N. Millennium Development Goal No. 5, which calls on nations to reduce maternal mortality by three-fourths between 1990 and 2015. With three years left to go, Morocco is one of a small group on track, a September 2011 study found. Other hopefuls are countries such as China, Egypt and Turkey, the study published in The Lancet reported.
For all its progress, however, the country is still far behind industrialized nations. In Morocco, 112 women die per 100,000 live births, according to the 2009-2010 national population survey. The U.S. maternal mortality rate is 24 per 100,000 live births. Ireland has one of the lowest, at 3 deaths per 100,000 live births.
As she waited for the nurse, Boudraa shyly said shed heard from those in the neighborhood that women could die if a pregnancy goes wrong at home. So even though she was born at home, along with three of her four siblings, Boudraa was making a different choice. She planned to give birth in a hospital, about a 15-minute taxi ride away.
Fatima Moukaby, one of the four nurses at the 5-year-old Alwaha clinic, has been working in the field for 21 years and said shes seen a big shift in line with Boudraas decisions.
When I started my job we received few pregnant women because women were giving birth at home, but now we receive too many pregnant women, said Moukaby. The clinics three doctors each see at least 80 patients a day, she added.
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