Making a Difference

February 15, 2011

Dear Friend,

A few minutes ago, a young woman in Kenya developed a sudden hemorrhage just after giving birth; she received emergency treatment, and survived. Right now, an expectant mother in India is getting medicine to control the high blood pressure that threatens her life and that of her baby, due to be born within weeks. Later today, a teenage girl in a Bolivian mountain village will learn how to use contraceptives; she won’t get pregnant until she decides she’s ready, will finish school, and will have a chance to lift herself out of poverty.

These are the powerful, if unremarkable, stories of women whose lives are being saved every day in our battle against maternal death. When Family Care International began in 1987, more than half a million women were dying every year from complications of pregnancy and childbirth. New research shows that the policies and programs FCI has fought to put in place are working — maternal deaths have been reduced by nearly 200,000 a year. Every three minutes, a woman who would have been carried to the graveyard now goes home to her family, child in her arms.

FCI’s work over the past two decades has helped make this happen. Here is some of what we’ve done this year, thanks to the support of FCI’s donors:

• In Burkina Faso, a landlocked, desperately poor country in West Africa, we helped residents of nearly 700 rural villages — most of which lack even basic health clinics — arrange transportation so that women with obstetric complications can get the lifesaving care they need; and we continued our program that has provided more than 300 women with surgical treatment for obstetric fistula, a childbirth injury that often leads to a lifetime of illness and social ostracism.
• In South America, FCI provided women in indigenous communities with information and skills to fight for the maternal health services that are their legal right; and we partnered with six national governments to identify and promote the most effective ways to help teenagers — whose risk of maternal death is four times higher than for adult women — avoid getting pregnant.
• In New York, we teamed up with the UN Secretary-General to launch a Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health, an unprecedented, progressive plan to save the lives of 16 million women, newborns, and children in the world’s poorest countries. Almost 50 countries committed to new financial investments, policy changes, and health services, giving our work more visibility and greater momentum than ever before.

These successes, and the many women’s lives that have been saved, do not mark the end of our work —only the end of the beginning. A pregnant woman or new mother still dies every ninety seconds, 350,000 each year. Almost all of these deaths are preventable, and at least one in five results from an unplanned pregnancy.

That is why FCI is here, and why we urgently need your generous contribution. FCI holds governments accountable for meeting their commitments to invest in maternal health and family planning, build clinics, train health workers, and distribute essential medicines. We educate doctors, nurses, midwives, and clinic managers to offer appropriate, effective care. And our programs and publications empower women and communities to demand the information, education, and health services they need to make healthy decisions, avoid unwanted pregnancy, and live healthy, productive lives.

Your help is essential to all of FCI’s critically important work, now more than ever. This year, the global financial crisis has severely limited the grants available from governments and foundations: we need you to help fill the gap. Please give as generously as you possibly can. Thank you, as always.

Warm wishes,

Ann M. Starrs
President

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