An emaciated Kumudha looks the very symbol of women who have no reproductive agency or bodily rights, one of the many reasons for the neonatal deaths that occurred at the government hospital here last weekend.
A week after losing her two-day-old son to preterm-low birth weight complications, Kumudha just returned home after administration of intravenous fluids at the primary health centre at Palayamapudur, some six km from Eachampatti.
This 23-year-old mother of two girls was compelled into this futile pregnancy by her husband, who wanted a son. Kumudha’s neo-natal weight was as low as 45 kg, and her baby boy’s was 1.5 kg.
“I’m happy with my two daughters. But, ask him,” says Kumudha, with palpable fear of her husband. For her husband Mariappan, 32, a daily wage worker, it matters little whether or not he has any money to buy a pack of glucose for his wife. All he wants is a son. The State government’s girl child’s savings deposit of Rs.50,000 for families that undergo sterilisation after one or two girls is of no significance.
Kumudha’s is one of the two cases of neonatal deaths from Pattagapatty village in Eachampatti. The second case was that of Sathya, 22, who underwent a Caesarean section at a private hospital for her third baby. The baby girl died later of sepsis at the government hospital.
Until three years ago, when deliveries were allowed at sub-centres, the Eachampatti sub-centre had seen more than 1,000 deliveries under the stellar performance of its village health nurse Mallika. But since April, the sub-centre has remained shut, after she retired at the end of two decades of service. Three months ago, a woman was delivered of a baby outside the locked gate of this sub-centre. “We, women, midwifed her delivery right at the gate,” says Lakshmi, a local.
Ten days ago, Maheshwari, 19, gave birth to a baby girl in an auto, before she could reach the Palayamputhur PHC. After being tossed between the PHC and the Dharmapuri government hospital for a birth certificate — since the authorities were not sure how to record the place of birth — the VAO has agreed to give her one. “Pregnant women will have somebody to guide them if only the government fills this vacancy and reopens this sub-centre,” says Lakshmi. With the sub-centre closed, for eight villages further down, the Palayamputhur PHC is as far as 15 km.
Shakuntala, 25, gave birth to her third son, after she underwent a botched tubectomy at the Palayamputhur PHC. Today, she has little nourishment to feed her 11-month-old. “It’ll be unfair to ask my husband to undergo sterilisation, since he breaks stones,” says Maheshwari.
For now, she wonders whether she would get any compensation from the Palayampudur PHC. Here, at Eachampatti, girls barely 19 are married, and often they are mothers of one or two children. These women also represent how patriarchy trumps education. Almost all girls have gone to high school, while their husbands have little schooling. Besides gaps in institutional public health delivery at the grassroots, early marriages, preference for son that induces multiple pregnancies, and patriarchy have whittled away at women’s reproductive health.
