ISLAMABAD, June 1: Two women die every 40 minutes and 30,000 annually due to pregnancy-related complications in Pakistan.

These figures were quoted by Prof Dr Sadiqa Jafri, the president National Committee for Maternal Health (NCMH), at a seminar held here to mark the international Day of the Midwife on Saturday. The NCMH organized the conference in collaboration with the UNFPA.

Emphasizing the need for a “Midwifery Act” to make possible safer deliveries, Dr Jafri said the life-time risk of maternal death was very high in Pakistan at one in 38 as compared to one in 230 in Sri Lanka, one in 5,100 in the United Kingdom and one in 6,000 in Sweden.

Less than 30 per cent of the Pakistani pregnant women get specialized care and over 55 per cent of them are anaemic. A third of the pregnant and half of the lactating women get less than 70 per cent of the recommended calorie intake. Just 54 per cent of the pregnant women are immunized against tetanus.

As many as 25 per cent of all neonates have low birth weight of less than 2.5kg. An estimated 400,000 to 500,000 babies are either born dead, or die within the first week of birth.

The professor also highlighted the need for a nation-wide programme in this sector, saying that the government initiatives including the training of traditional birth attendants (TBAs) did not have the desired impact due to a lack of supervision and backup.

She said a comprehensive policy should be devised for judicious utilization of the available funds.

She lamented that midwifery was a neglected profession in Pakistan where very few of the 10,000 trained midwives were actually practising the profession. Their training, too, is deficient in skill-development, she added.

Dr Jafri informed the audience that there were approximately 32 million women in the reproductive age group of 15 to 49 years in Pakistan, a majority of whom were poor and illiterate. Eight to nine babies are born every minute and four to five million annually in Pakistan where the fertility rate is as high as 5.1 meaning that a Pakistani woman will bear five children by the end of her reproductive life.