While Prime Minister Stephen Harper is reaching out to help women in the developing world with his maternal health plan, a prominent doctors group says more needs to be done in this country to ensure our own mothers are safe during childbirth.
André Lalonde, executive vice-president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada, said about 30 women a day suffer major health issues and come close to dying - many due to hemorrhage - during childbirth. Canada's system to track what put these women in danger is so slow to report, he said, it makes it difficult to prevent those situations from happening again.
"We need to study these adverse events," Dr. Lalonde said in a telephone interview from Montreal. "Because you may find that it was an administrative glitch or something, and maybe if we found that out, all that treatment [such as blood transfusions]may not have [had to]occurred."
That figure of 30 "near misses," as he called them, is in addition to the two dozen women across the country that Health Canada estimates die each year during childbirth, or shortly thereafter. Main causes include hemorrhage, strokes or heart attacks.
Africa and Asia account for the vast majority of 529,000 maternal deaths worldwide each year; mothers die from hemorrhage, infection, unsafe abortion, eclampsia (very high blood pressure leading to seizures) and obstructed labour, according to World Health Organization figures.