Maternal Health in India

Maternal health encompasses a network of aspects, such as family planning, prenatal and postnatal care and preconception. Maternal health in India hasn’t been crowned the best or even well defined. This stems from the lack of awareness and education among women. The maternal health crisis also varies geographically i.e. one may be able to draw a great difference between the state of maternal health in rural India and that in urban India.

Family planning in India has been a concern of several debates since time immemorial, especially when the exploding number of people populating the country is concerned. The government has launched several nationwide programmes to curtail the increasing number of programs. Despite being home to one of the oldest family planning programs in the world, India has a crude birth rate of 23/1,000 persons and a fertility rate of 2.9 persons. Therefore, statistically, the number of births per female is high.

This high rate of fertility and birth by a female indicates that she, on an average, gives birth to at least two children during her reproductive age. While this may sound normal, women in the rural areas have been observed to give birth to as many as ten children irrespective of weighing whether they will be able to sustain them or not.

The women do not often get enough time to recover from childbirth. Some of the factors that lead to a high maternal mortality rate include factors, such as haemorrhage, obstructed labour, anaemia, unsafe abortion, puerperal sepsis and unsafe abortion.

The services that are offered from maternal care in the urban areas have been observed to follow a certain pattern of inequality. In the cities, urban marginalisation takes place by virtue of which only the upper end of the society is offered services. Moreover, the private health care services are beyond the budget of the marginalised section of the society.

The Indian Government had stated that the country’ had improved considerably because over 10 million women had given birth in health care facilities in the year 2009. It has, however, been noted that the Indian government brings women to give birth in health care facilities by attracting them with cash incentives. The government also does not check or measure number of women, who survive the delivery and post delivery period.