In developing countries, infant mortality is nine times higher than in developed countries, while maternal mortality is 100 times higher. But there is a severe global shortage of trained midwives. Seventy percent of the women in the third world will have no trained attendant present when they give birth, with eighty percent having received no prenatal care at all. Safe motherhood, the global effort to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity, has been called the health issue of the 1990s. There is an urgent call from the third world for trained midwives.
Midwifery education is a life saving solution.
That in this day and age one million women world wide should die from preventable causes while trying to perform their God-given gift of bringing forth new life, is as unjust as it is cruel. Forty thousand children under the age of five die every day in developing countries from preventable or treatable causes. Over a two day period, more children die than all the Americans who died in the Vietnam war. Diarrhea is an illness that kills three and one-half million children per year. Five million more children die each year from diseases that could be eliminated with immunizations.