Safe Motherhood

Safe motherhood is considered as an important part of reproductive health. It includes various measures used to protect a mother from the problems related to pregnancy and delivery. A mother has to struggle for life while giving birth to a child. In this context, the International Convention on Population and Environment held in Cairo, the capital city of Egypt, has reported the death of annual five lakhs women in the world from the problems related to pregnancy in the decade of 1990. Moreover, a target is made to reduce this rate to 1. 25 lakh by 2015 A.D. Safe motherhood is the part of reproductive health and rights. It is the process of giving birth without any harm and injury during delivery and the cases done during pregnancy. In Nepal, many females die each year due to the complicated pregnancy and the problem of childbirth. To achieve this goal, mother's health should be made well. She should be provided with the nutritious diet. She should properly care in every respect of the complications. Safe motherhood is series of guidelines consequences during delivery.

It teaches us to perform the following aspects:

1. The appropriate age of female to be pregnant from the point of view of safe motherhood.
2. The way pregnant woman cares.
3. The way to provide standard maternity care.

Safe motherhood begins before conception with proper nutrition and a healthy lifestyle and continues with appropriate prenatal care the prevention of complications when possible, and the early and effective treatment of complications.

The following services should be considered in safe motherhood

• Imparting education on safe motherhood to women: Many parents and women of our country lack knowledge on the proper age for marriage and first conception age. Therefore, the mortality rate due to the complexity of pregnancy and delivery related cases are very high in our country. When women get pregnant before the age of twenty, then many hazards may lie in their health because they are reproductively immature to give a birth. Moreover, healthy women can give birth to a healthy baby so if the mother's health is not sound then obviously the baby's health becomes very poor. Many women are unaware about the advantages of the birth spacing and less number of children in a family. For mother's good health and providing proper care to the children, the family size should be maintained small by controlling birth. This sort of education to women can significantly improve the mother's health.

• Improvement in mother's diet: A large number of women die each year in the world due to lack of nutritious diet during pregnancy period. In some countries, women are not provided nutritious diets such as milk, eggs, meat and other foods. As a result, the health of the other becomes worse and different deformities like childbirth with low weight and anemia appear. In order to minimize maternally and infant death, the mother should consume fruits, fish, meat and, green, vegetables, bean, milk products and other nutritious diets.

• Delivery assistance in all the cases by a trained person: All the delivery cases should be assisted by the trained person like midwives available in hospitals. If delivery is made by untrained persons, then the health of both mother and child lives at risk. So, it is imperative to have safe delivery by trained persons for safe motherhood.

• Counseling on family planning: It is important to educate women on family planning, means of contraceptives and importance of birth spacing. Counseling to women of family planning helps them to plan for a happy family and it also helps in safe motherhood. Many problems associated with the high maternal mortality rate can be significantly reduced by educating women in this part. Unsafe abortion may lead the life of a mother at risk. So, it is important to provide them right information on abortion and support them for abortion in the needy cases.

• Care of mother in prenatal, postnatal and lactating stages: A woman needs care during pregnancy, delivery and child caring periods. There must be nutritious diet, cleanliness and immunization during these stages. She also needs counseling for better care of her own health and the baby's health. It is extremely necessary to have regular health check- up during pregnancy. Therefore, safe motherhood is only possible if women get care during pregnancy, delivery and post-delivery periods.