This month, we celebrate mothers (even more than usual). Women who gave their children life and then steadfastly continue to do everything in their power to make that life happy and whole. As part of that celebration, Bamboobies is proud to partner with an organization that ensures more mothers are able to be there to make their children’s lives better.
Becoming a mother can be a grueling undertaking in and of itself. There are rules to follow, appointments to attend, vitamins to take, and general care measures to ensure both mother and baby are safe and healthy. Many women in the U.S. likely take for granted how relatively safe becoming a mom can be with the right access to proper care. In some parts of the world, just becoming a mother can be life-threatening. That’s where Saving Mothers comes in.
Saving Mothers is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization “dedicated to eradicating preventable maternal deaths and birth-related complications in low-resource settings.” According to the organization’s website, more than 300,000 women and girls die from pregnancy and childbirth complications each year. (That’s one mother dying every two minutes.) In fact, the organization says, women in developing nations are up to 43% more likely to die in childbirth. Up to 73% of these maternal deaths could be prevented with education and training around simple obstetric complications. Further, with 90% of women in low-resource settings delivering outside of a hospital, unsanitary conditions can exacerbate the problem.
Saving Mothers
Saving Mothers was founded in 2009 with a vision that “no woman should die giving life.” Founder Dr. Tara Shirazian saw drastic inequalities in maternal Obstetrics/Gynecology care based on a mother’s location or ability to pay. She grew the organization to tackle these inequalities on a global scale, enlisting the help of leading U.S. physicians and surgeons in the maternal health field to train local medical providers around the world in lifesaving skills and provide reproductive health education.
Today, Saving Mothers works with governments and local organizations to provide customized maternal health care resources based on the specific needs of the communities it serves. The organization also brings biomedical technologies where they’re needed most.
Locally, Saving Mothers has been tackling the high maternal death rates (20.6 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2018) and racial disparities in New York. In response to reports of these shocking numbers right in the organization’s backyard (Saving Mothers is headquartered in New York), the team conducted an extensive review of current interventions and began a health literacy program with the Northern Manhattan Perinatal Partnership. The mPOWHER kit program empowers women with information about maintaining a healthy pregnancy, possible complications, labor, and postpartum care, as well as risk factors that can contribute to deadly complications such as pulmonary embolism and preeclampsia. The program also trains community healthcare workers in the same topics, along with how to identify high-risk complications in pregnant women.
Teaming up
Bamboobies is partnering with Saving Mothers to do a monthly donation. We’re proud to support an organization dedicated to supporting women in the earliest stages of motherhood, when many around the world need it most. We exist to empower moms from the first moment they consider motherhood, through pregnancy, and after baby arrives. Saving Mothers does that for some of the most vulnerable mothers out there.
We see no better way to celebrate and lift up mothers everywhere this month.
References:
Saving Mothers: Saving Mothers
https://savingmothers.org/
Saving Mothers: Our Vision
https://savingmothers.org/our-vision/
Saving Mothers: mPOWHER
https://savingmothers.org/mpowher-nyc/
Saving Mothers: Two decades of interventions in New York State to reduce maternal mortality: a systematic review
https://savingmothers.org/uploads/2020/01/Two-decades-of-interventions-in-New-York-State-2.pdf