March 2024 Blog: A perspective on Women's Day 2024
Women’s day reminds everyone about issues such as the struggle for equal opportunities, unequal pay, discrimination, sexual violence, inequitable access to healthcare, just to name a few. The Asian Development Bank #ADB points many of them out in their post including the fact that the situation is especially worrisome in Asia.
When reading this and seeing the images, I noticed the absence of one challenge - one barrier to be broken, although it is one of the most basic and important for women: Women mortality.
The ultimate failure of healthcare is death. People in healthcare look at that when assessing “mortality”, be it related to infectious disease, cancer or other ailments. Men face all risks of death women do except for one: the risk of dying during pregnancy. So is Women’s Day not a most appropriate day to also - or better specifically - remember the mortalities that affects women only?.
So what about Cervical Cancer, which we now know can be prevented by vaccination against HPV? What are we doing to prevent it? What about breast Cancer, the most common cancer in the world after skin cancer? Where are we with screening on a global scale? And what about maternal mortality?
According to the Pew Research Center, currently 86% of women in the United States between the age of 40 and 44 years old are mothers. In the Philippines, 10% of women are already mothers at the age of 20 years old (according to the Philippine Statistics Authority PSA). Fact is, the vast majority of women become mothers, which is why it is still a tragedy that every two minutes a woman dies of mostly preventable causes related to pregnancy. For us that means women’s day is most certainly also a day when we need to think about this fact.
Considering this, we are grateful that LMI has been recognized by the Department of Health and the National Commission for Indigenous Peoples #NCIP in the Philippines for its efforts to improve access to technology and decrease maternal mortality, the only mortality affecting women only.
So, while we celebrate women’s day by continuing our efforts benefitting the vast majority of them (and their babies), make no mistake- there is more work to be done
Abante Babae!