Running for new mothers

 WHILE Australian women going into labour may face an anxious car ride to hospital, just across the Torres Strait, many women in Papua New Guinea face a five-hour walk to the nearest healthcare centre.

It’s enough for many of them not to bother, especially since many can’t afford the hospital fee of up to A$4.50 (K10.20), and don’t want to face the shame of not having clothes, nappies or soap for their newborn.

As a result, women in PNG are 33 times more likely to die in childbirth than in Australia.

On Sunday, Tara Taubenschlag will be running the Australian Running Festival half-marathon to highlight the fact that distance is one of the greatest contributors to maternal mortality.

“‘I figured if a pregnant woman can walk four or five hours, 20km or 30km, to get to a health service, I can do a half-marathon,” she said.

Taubenschlag is now a board member of Send Hope Not Flowers, a charity that encourages people to send donations to help mothers in developing countries in lieu of flowers to new mothers.

Taubenschlag, a mother of two, felt compelled to get involved in Send Hope after hearing “distressing” stories from the Canberra obstetrician who co-founded the charity, Dr Steve Robson.

Send Hope partners with a number of organisations, training midwives in Indonesia, providing emergency kits for hospitals in the Solomon Islands or, in the case of a health clinic in Milne Bay in PNG, providing free kits of essential items to mothers who give birth there.

The “‘baby bundles”, which cost less than A$30 each (K68), are proving a powerful incentive for women to have a supervised birth, and the local maternal mortality rate is dropping.

It’s a cheap price to pay to save a life.