 |
|
New York: American women are more likely to have sexual or reproductive health problems than women in other developed countries, two nongovernmental organizations reported.
"The key reason for the low U.S. ranking is that while most women in the United States have excellent prenatal care, and very few women die from pregnancy-related causes, the United States has more teenage mothers than any other industrialized country," said a report put out by CARE and Population Action International.
"We just haven't made the commitment to our kids that we need to," said Population Action International president Amy Coen, arguing for more comprehensive sexual education and family planning services for teens at a news conference yesterday.
The report ranked 133 countries on the basis of 10 indicators:teen and adult births, contraceptive use, HIV/AIDS rates, access to pregnancy and childbirth services, pregnancy and childbirth mortality, abortion policies and anemia in pregnant women.
All of the 10 lowest-risk countries -- the United States ranks 14th -- are in Europe except for Singapore and Australia. The 10 highest- risk countries are in sub-Saharan Africa with the exception of Afghanistan.
In the lowest-risk country, Italy, one woman in 6,261 is at risk of dying from complications of pregnancy, childbirth or unsafe abortion, said the report, compared with one of every seven in Ethiopia, the highest-risk country.
The report closely paralleled the results of a study released recently by the UN Population Division, which said that the HIV/AIDS epidemic had caused life expectancy in the 35 most highly affected countries, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, to drop to 48.6 years last year, a year lower than it was 10 years earlier.
Despite their health problems, however, 16 of those countries -- 13 of them in sub-Saharan Africa -- have such high fertility rates that their joint population is expected to nearly quadruple in the first half of the century.
The underlying problem, according to CARE and Population Action International, is a failure by many of these 179 nations, including the United States, to live up to promises they made to finance universal access to basic reproductive health services at an international conference in Cairo in 1994. By last year the countries should have been spending $17 billion annually on such services, but the United States was giving less than half its "fair share," said the two groups.
CARE health and population director Maurice Middleberg said yesterday that amount could drop further if the Bush administration does not push Congress to allocate the full $430 million in international family planning assistance it has proposed. Just after taking office, President George W. Bush restored restrictions on the aid that had originally been imposed by the Reagan administration but eased by the Clinton administration. The new restriction bars money from going to any overseas group that helps pregnant women get abortions.
Middleberg argued that there is a huge pent-up demand in developing countries for access to contraception, which in turn would lower infant mortality by helping mothers space births more than two years apart.
"Contraception is as important to child survival as antibiotics," he said.