First, on AIDS spread in Africa. Michael Fumento in The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS points out that, as HIV is most efficiently transferred when there is an open sore present, the vast prevalence of VD in Africa makes a huge difference. If, instead of sending to stricken countries complicated and expensive antiretroviral drugs of dubious efficacy, the UN, WHO and other concerned parties sent the much cheaper and more effective antibiotics needed to cure syphillis and gonorrhea, they would do infinitely more to slow the spread of AIDS.
Second, on violence as a cause of death in pregnancy: in discussion with friends in the medical field I've become aware of an interesting point. Most of the medical complications that result in maternal death become most severe toward the end of pregnancy. If a woman is being treated for a life-threatening problem during pregnancy, and if it becomes clear that she will likely not survive, I am told that a C-section is routinely performed for viable fetuses (which most are in the 8th and 9th months.) Thus the cause of the mother's death is a complication of pregnancy, but she will not be considered to have been pregnant when she died, since strictly speaking the baby had been delivered. (This is a bit grisly.) Thank heaven this is relatively rare in our society, as is any death of a pregnant woman. This might go further toward explaining, though, why death by violence appears to be a disturbingly high proportion of deaths of pregnant women.
Of course, while any violent death is a travesty, and the murder of a pregnant woman even more so, it can't be stressed enough that the reason we are even discussing this is that our standard of living is so much higher than almost everyone else's. In countries where clean water is hard to find, more pregnant women die of violence than in North America, but these deaths are dwarfed by the many who die of inadequate nutrition, lack of even minimal health care, and so on.
Posted by Clio at March 3, 2003 04:33 PM