Author Archives: kiah

Singing the Post-Baby Blues: Post-Partum Depression in the Developing World

March 8, 2012 in mental health, Repro Health/HIV and tagged by kiah
For the final installment of the Birth Day Blog, it’s time to talk about what happens after the Birth Day has passed, after the cord stump has dried, the well-wishers have gone home, and, if a woman is so blessed, the congratulatory flowers have started to droop and the balloons to deflate. After the initial [...]

SPECIAL DELIVERY: HIV Births in Developing Countries

March 1, 2012 in Repro Health/HIV and tagged by kiah
According to UNICEF (2012), over 3.4 million children in the world today are HIV positive and up to 400,000 more become infected each year (1). Worldwide over 1,000 infants are infected daily through transmission from their mothers during pregnancy, labor/delivery or breastfeeding, thus accounting for the vast majority of HIV-infections in under-fives (1). Without treatment, [...]

Palestine/Israel: Politics, Birth and Death by the Roadside

February 22, 2012 in Repro Health/HIV and tagged by kiah
“After what I have been through, I hated my body and that of all women,” she said. “I cannot look at myself in the mirror and breastfeed my own daughter, thinking she was the cause in all of this” (1). This quotation comes from the testimony of Fatima, a young Palestinian woman who was forced [...]

Birth My Way: Respecting Cultural Tradition in Hospital Labor and Delivery

February 16, 2012 in Repro Health/HIV and tagged by kiah
“Before, the doctors would treat us badly. When we were giving birth they would shout, ‘you dirty Indian, you opened your legs when you felt like it and now you’re screaming! Shut up now!’” – Giovanna Álvarez, head of the LMGAI/LMFC Users’ Committee in Saquisilí, Ecuador. As mentioned last week, one of the greatest obstacles [...]

Free Maternal Health Care for All!: An Ecuador Case Study

February 9, 2012 in Repro Health/HIV and tagged by kiah
The stigmas associated with the female reproductive process are boundless. Past discussions have dealt mainly with discrimination between men and women. For the next few weeks, I’ll progress to discuss a different kind of discrimination and barriers that many women face during pregnancy, labor and delivery while trying to access existing maternal health care in [...]

Love Always®, A Girl

February 2, 2012 in Repro Health/HIV and tagged by kiah
Check out SHE’s introductory video here: http://www.sheinnovates.com/index.html or here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKmt7PwYPCY&feature=player_embedded Last week, I wrote at length about the multiplicity of challenges facing women around the world with regards to managing their menstruation cycle. This week is dedicated to outlining various promising, although currently slow to be implemented, solutions that have the potential to prevent health [...]

The Women’s Monthly: Shame, Secrecy, Solidarity and Savior?

January 26, 2012 in Repro Health/HIV and tagged by kiah
It may be presupposed that the path to having a happy birth day beings with “hav[ing] a happy Period” (c/o Always®), but for millions of the world’s girls there’s no happy green plastic bag or blue box with photos of a vibrant professional woman on them. Instead, there is shame, pain, fear and misery. We’ve [...]

The Happy Birth Day Column: Opportunities, Abuses and Challenges of Reproduction for Women Around the World

January 19, 2012 in Repro Health/HIV and tagged by kiah
“Have a happy Birth Day.” Thus reads the slogan on a billboard advertising high quality maternity care at Harris Methodist Hospital in Fort Worth, TX, my hometown. The billboard shows a happy new mom smiling down at her clean and healthy tiny infant. While there are plenty of us who don’t see anything happy about [...]