Health: Maternal Health

Lord Winston Excerpts

Wednesday 12th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston]

My Lords, I declare an interest as Emeritus Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College and Professor of Science and Society. Also, I was a scientific adviser to the WHO on its reproductive programme in the 1970s and an adviser to the International Planned Parenthood Federation during that decade.

I remember approaching, while I was on that mission, a Bangladeshi farmer who had five sons. He said, “Look, I am rich in my poor community because I have five sons who will look after me in my old age”. That is one of the key problems. Some 15 years ago in this Chamber, the noble Baroness, Lady Chalker, pointed out that contraception was not ultimately what “controlled” populations. Quite clearly, what is needed is better infrastructure and education, better status of women and better women’s health.

That is why I am somewhat critical of the aims that I understand are part of the Government’s, which are to improve contraception and safe abortion. While those are worthy causes, they will not deal with the basic problem of the massive incidence of maternal mortality, particularly in places such as Nigeria, Ethiopia, Congo and India, where 50 per cent of these deaths, with the other three countries that are cited by Margaret Hogan in her excellent paper in the Lancet, are recorded.

One has to accept that almost certainly the original half million is an underestimate. A 1.5 per cent decrease per annum will clearly not meet the targets that are needed. There is a serious problem, particularly as in many cases the number of maternal deaths—those from ectopic pregnancy, for example, which is largely silent and hardly ever diagnosed in the third world—must be underestimated. The same applies to abortion. Even where safe abortions are possible, it is difficult in many cases for women in these poor countries to seek them because of the social pressures on them. There is a huge amount of work still to be done.