Health: Maternal Health

Lord Jones of Cheltenham Excerpts

Wednesday 12th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jones of Cheltenham]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Patel, on securing this important debate and the noble Lord, Lord Green, on his very interesting maiden speech.

In 2009, I joined Commonwealth Parliamentary Association delegations to Sierra Leone and Cameroon. I am a patron of the Kambia appeal, in my former constituency of Cheltenham, which supports healthcare in the Kambia region of north-east Sierra Leone. Both CPA delegations attended presentations about gender issues, covering the huge birth rate, the need for education, pre and postnatal care, contraception, violence towards women and the tragedy of so many deaths caused by illegal abortions.

I want to tell noble Lords particularly about the session in Cameroon, which was also attended by Members of the Cameroon parliament. One outspoken chief asked why gender issues always meant women’s issues. He said that it was the role of men to be head of the family and to lead the way, and he dismissed many of the problems and said female genital mutilation—FGM—was exactly the same as circumcision in boys. This shocked us. It produced an explosive response from our delegation leader, the former MP Joan Ryan. She told him that he was talking gibberish, that FGM was an appallingly disfiguring practice that should be outlawed and that two children were enough for anyone if Cameroon wanted to progress by enabling women to play a full economic part in their country’s development, instead of leading lives of continuous breeding from an early age. She finished by telling the chief: “Girls are just as intelligent as boys. Women are equal to men, and if you don’t like it we may just have to dominate you”. How she is missed in another place.

We must help men in developing countries to understand their responsibilities in helping to achieve MDG 5. Without that breakthrough, I fear that we will continue to see women dying before childbirth, in childbirth and after childbirth in numbers that are all too horrible to imagine.