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Iraq's Woes Are Adding Major Risks To Childbirth
Amira Saeed tends to daughter-in-law Noor Ibrahim after her emergency Caesarean section at al-Jarrah Hospital in Baghdad.
(By Naseer Nouri -- The Washington Post)
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Women are increasingly asking doctors to schedule elective Caesarean sections to avoid experiences such as Ibrahim's, obstetricians said.
At al-Hayat Hospital in Baghdad, doctors used to perform 160 vaginal deliveries a week, said Maysoon Abbas, an obstetrician. As of Dec. 29, they had done 59 during the entire month.
Patients increasingly plead with her to let them have Caesareans before 5 p.m. because they don't want to drive to the hospital at night.
During curfew, ambulance drivers and even police officers sometimes charge women for rides to the hospital, or refuse to take their husbands out of fear that they are suicide bombers, doctors said.
"It's a tragedy," Abbas said. "It is a tragedy."
Unable or unwilling to go to hospitals, many women are receiving inadequate prenatal care, which is contributing to birth defects, doctors said. Al-Jarrah's obstetrician said she used to see one baby a week with congenital abnormalities. Now she sees five or six.
Many women are opting to go to neighborhood midwives when it is time to deliver.
Samira Najeeb, who delivers babies in a small room with pink walls next to her kitchen in her first-floor apartment in Karrada, insists that midwives are just as capable of delivering babies as doctors, despite having less formal training. Each year, she takes a one-month refresher course, she said.
Her mother was a midwife. Her sister is a midwife. Najeeb delivered her first baby when she was 12. Now 40, she keeps a handwritten record of the 350 or so babies she has delivered.
"When there's difficulty getting to the hospital, they come to me," she said. "Now work for me is better than before."
A Mother's Painful Plea
In Ibrahim's room at al-Jarrah, 19 hours after their ordeal began, Saeed tended to her daughter-in-law. She had been wheeled out of surgery a few minutes earlier.
Ibrahim is 20 years old. She lost her father in the Iran-Iraq war when she was 2.
