Effect of Women's Health on Family & Community

When mama's happy, everybody's happy. We've all heard the axiom. But the more immediate issue is her health. Where women are healthy and thriving, the family and community are healthy and thriving. Where women are denied adequate care-where they are sick-their communities are sick. A woman's access to adequate healthcare speaks volumes about nearly every aspect of her children, family and community's well-being. In fact, women's health is a reliable indicator of economic development, educational achievement and respect for human rights. The United Nations recognized the crucial impact of women's health in 2000 when it adopted its Millennium Development Goals, four of which related directly to this issue:

Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women

Goal 5: Improve maternal health

Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases

For more information about the Millenium Goals, visit their website.

Poverty and Women's Health

When half the world's women live in severe poverty (characterized by earning less than two dollars a day), poor health fuels an already desperate situation. When proper nutrition, vaccines, preventative care and health education are out of reach, people are far more vulnerable. Poverty means limited access to proper professional care and medicine. All too commonly, poor villages and neighborhoods do not have medical clinics, let alone well-staffed ones adequately stocked with medicine and supplies. Clinics may be several villages or many miles away, and the cost of transportation is often prohibitive. When diseases and accidents occur, bodies that are not sustained by healthy food and adequate care are less resilient. Compounding the problem, women often are meaningfully contributing to their family's meager existence and cannot afford to stop working in order to rest and recover properly.

Poor Reproductive Health

Reproductive health problems, exacerbated by generally poor health and inadequate care, are the leading cause of women's illness and death worldwide. Collectively, women face a 15 percent risk of complications during childbirth. But while women in developed countries rarely die in childbirth, most of sub-Saharan Africa, where there is little access to advanced medical procedures, has a maternal death rate of 1,000 women per 100,000 live births.

Young women are at particular risk. Poor nutrition among girls leads to stunted growth, a key contributing factor to poor maternal health and outcome. The risk of death during childbirth is two to four times higher among mothers aged 17 or younger than among mothers over 20.

Women in much of the world lack dominion over the most basic decision about their bodies: when and if they will have children. More than 50 percent of women in some countries report that they would have preferred to postpone or avoid their most recent birth. And access to family planning varies widely by country. In Brazil and Colombia, 65 percent of married women use contraceptives, but in most Sub-Saharan African countries, fewer than one in five women use them. Millions of unintended pregnancies result, and each year 19 million abortions are carried out in unsafe conditions, leading to at least 68,000 preventable deaths.

Repeated pregnancies are often an underlying cause of women's health problems, as their bodies, already taxed by poverty, are repeatedly put under stress. In addition, preventative care can be non-existent. For poor women, access to pap smears and other types of routine screening are particularly limited. Clinics may lack the proper equipment or be unable or unwilling to do basic reproductive health outreach and education.

Women and AIDS

The number of women living with HIV/AIDS is growing quickly worldwide. In southern Africa, where the disease has deeply taken hold, women are 1.3 times more likely to be infected than men, and young women are especially at risk.

A number of societal and cultural issues contribute to women's increased risk. Pervasive disempowerment of women within a society makes them less able to demand safer sex, or, indeed, to decide whether they will have sex at all. In one province in South Africa, for example, almost a third of women associated their first sexual experience with some type of coercion.

Within marriage or longer-term relationships, the request to use a condom during sex is often seen as proof of a women's infidelity. Therefore, if her partner is having unprotected sex with others or engaging in other kinds of risky behavior, she has no way to protect herself. Often, men must leave their homes and communities to find work. While away, if husbands have unprotected sex and become infected with HIV, there is a high likelihood of infecting their wives once they return home.

Lack of education also is a key factor. Globally, women and girls have less access to education than boys and men, which includes education on health topics and HIV/AIDS. In a range of countries with medium to high epidemics, generally only 20 to 40 percent of women between 15 and 24 were able to name three HIV-prevention methods: for example, abstinence, sex with one faithful partner, and condom use.

Women are also biologically more likely to contract HIV/AIDS through heterosexual sex than men. Despite this, there are currently no widely available woman-controlled methods that prevent HIV transmission during sex.

Healing a Sick Situation

Fighting to improve women's health must necessarily be combined with efforts to increase gender equality and reduce poverty, since those two factors most limit women's access to health services. Widespread devaluation of women means that at the infrastructure level, energy and resources are not put toward improving women's healthcare. All too often, on a family level, "female problems" are not judged sufficiently important to merit the allocation of scarce resources.

But women's problems are the world's problem.