"Saving Mothers, One at a Time"

That was the headline in this blog post that appeared in Nichols Kristof's "On the Ground Blog." It is by Sue Makin and is about her work as a missionary physician with women in a 190-bed hospital in southern Malawi. Here's an excerpt that gets at the gendered politics of health care delivery (and everything else, for what matter) in the impoverished country:

As Sam rightly points out, women in Malawi, regardless of age, are not empowered to make decisions about their own health. When they are sick or giving birth, they must wait for their husband or other male relatives to decide when they should be taken to the hospital. This leads to delays – particularly when the decision-making man has gone far away from the village – and many women who come to the hospital at all come late, when complications have already set in.