Health - Birth in Nepal

Nepal has some of the worst maternal death statistics in the world, with some six women dying in childbirth every day. Despite the political instability of the past ten years of civil war, the Nepalese government is introducing measures to improve safety for mothers but so far little seems to be working. Subina Shrestha, a Nepalese filmmaker who is herself five months pregnant, sets out to find out why so many mothers are dying in childbirth. In the following account she looks at the human stories behind these statistics. Ten years of civil war in Nepal took over 15,000 lives. Within the same period, childbirth took the lives of over 22,000 women. The war led to a revolution and there was an overhaul of the Nepali political system. The maternal deaths, however, hardly even featured in the newspapers.