Recently, newspapers were awash with the devastating news that a Nigerian was hanged in Singapore for drug trafficking. He had been on death row for more than eight years for the same offence and after a life-wrenching eight year-wait in jail, he was finally hanged. I groaned at the waste of a young life.
 
Stories have it that he was a footballer. I am not about to psycho-analyze the reasons behind someone taking such a life-threatening risk like drug trafficking especially when in the past, we have read the news that the penalty for such a crime is death by hanging in that country. It is not the first time we have read of such a harrowing outcome for drug trafficking Nigerians in foreign lands but unfortunately and tragically, it may not be the last.
 
I keep wondering why anybody who is aware of the dangerous outcome of drug trafficking would still embark upon a calamitous attempt at money making by carrying hard drugs. It is the same reason I wonder why Nigeria’s contraceptive prevalence rate is low and our maternal mortality rate is high. It is the same reason I always wonder why adults who engage in unprotected sex fail to use contraceptives and the resulting unwanted pregnancies are resolved via unsafe abortions that ultimately increase Nigeria’s already alarmingly high maternal mortality rates.
 
Every time I come across a report or statement that presents catastrophic statistics of Nigeria’s health environment, I bleed within because behind every statistic is an appalling narrative and behind every story is a name. Sometimes, these stories are very close to home. They are not just numbers of nameless individuals on Nigeria’s demographic surveys. These are people. Human beings with life and blood. Individuals dying because society is yet to make the decision that their lives are worth saving.
 
During the pregnancy with my first child, I had a friend who was equally pregnant but died few minutes after giving birth. Tragically, her baby died too. We lost mother and child. Her husband has not fully recovered from the tragedies because it was his first child. Another lady in my church was recently buried.
 
She was just thirty-one years old and married for only three years. Incidentally, the pregnancy was her first and she did not survive it. No woman should die while giving life. It is an anomaly that must stop. Families who are expecting good news should not be hounded with death news.
 
Parents expecting a grand child should not be drowned with the losses of not just the expected grandchild but their own daughter or daughter-in-law as well. Such tragedies should be fought on all fronts. Society must decide that the lives of these women are worth saving like Prof. Mahmoud Fathalla, past president of the International Federation of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said: “Women are not dying of diseases we can’t treat… They are dying because societies have yet to make the decision that their lives are worth saving.”
 
Read more at http://guardian.ng/features/maternal-mortality-and-shameful-statistics-s...