The Associated Press has found that the decision by the United States to slash its foreign aid funding last year has increased pregnancy complications and deaths in Nepal. The AP interviewed health workers, government officials, aid workers and families who said cuts to programs that ensured uneducated, impoverished pregnant women got proper nutrition and prenatal care have led to more babies and pregnant women dying. The U.S. State Department says it still supports programs in Nepal aimed at improving maternal and child health.
GAUR, Nepal (AP) — The young mother’s breath had grown ragged. Inside her mud home in rural Nepal, she hunched over in agony, pain pummeling her pregnant belly, her swollen legs scarcely able to support her.
Kabita Mukhiya was in the midst of an emergency, but didn’t know it. For weeks, she’d suffered at home, because there was nobody around to tell her to rush to a hospital. The aid workers who once regularly visited her village to help pregnant women had stopped coming, after foreign aid cuts by the United States shuttered a program aimed at saving mothers’ and babies’ lives.
Kabita was uneducated and impoverished, and she did not know what was happening to her body. In desperation, she turned at last to her aunt for help, who hauled her off to the hospital, where both women wept as the doctors said things neither could understand.
