POPULATION-INDIA: One-Child Ideal Catching On
Soma Basu
MADURAI, Tamil Nadu, Jul 10 2008 (IPS) – Ponni, 27, lay quiet on a missionary hospital bed in this small town, groggy from the anaesthetic administered to her for a caesarean delivery a couple of hours earlier.
By her side were no female attendants, a departure from the norm in India where the paternal or maternal grandmother is usually on hand to greet the newborn.
Instead, Ponni s husband, Sakthi, sat by the bedside patiently waiting for her to wake up and hold their first baby, a daughter.
Both Ponni and Sakthi are government employees, leading ordinary lives in this conservative town famous for its Hindu temples. What set them apart from the thousands of other couples in the town was their rather unusual decision to limit the size of their family…
AFRICA: Maternal Mortality, A Human Rights Catastrophe
Analysis by Rosemary Okello and Terna Gyuse
BRUSSELS and CAPE TOWN, Jun 30 2009 (IPS) – The right to the highest attainable standard of health: not the most fashionable of human rights, but the limits on people s enjoyment of their right to health often coincide with continuing inequalities behind claims of economic growth or political reform.
Women must gain greater involvement in shaping maternal health policies and p…
And Then There Was Sight
A child receives treatment at the Dr. K. Zaman BNSB Eye Hospital in the northeastern district of Mymensingh, Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS
MYMENSINGH, Bangladesh, Jun 24 2014 (IPS) – There was a time when four-year-old Taiba, a resident of Makril village in Bangladesh’s central Netrokona district, had little to smile about. The early years of her life were spent trying to cope with bilateral congenital cataracts, referred to in her village simply as ‘child blindness’.
The cloudy film on her natural lens made it difficult to recognise things, and her parents were beginning to despair that she would ever lead a normal life.
Now, sitti…