The baby thrown out the window

YOU MAY have read the story that appeared in this paper around the time of Mother’s Day, which we celebrated last Sunday.

The story tells of the extraordinary survival of an infant who was thrown out of a second-story window one early morning in a posh subdivision. Hearing the baby’s cries, a security guard and a passing jogger entered the yard and found the infant dangling from the branches of a nearby tree, its umbilical cord and bloody placenta still attached to the navel.

After police and first-aid workers were called, the authorities knocked on the door of the residence and inquired if anyone had thrown a newborn out the window. Following bloody tracks, they found a house maid cowering in a bathroom, out of which window the baby was thrown.

Accompanied by social workers to a hospital, the woman told them her story: She was married and had children who all stayed behind in Samar while she went to Manila as a domestic worker. Perhaps unwilling to reveal her secret to anybody, she decided to deliver the baby herself and to dispose of the “evidence.” No one yet knows who is the father of the unfortunate baby.

And yet, count the newborn extremely lucky. Save for a few scratches, the infant was found unharmed. Some rescuers claim that they found the baby holding on to a twig or vine, as if it was holding on for dear life. Even if the story turns out to have been born more out of fancy or imagination, the fact of the infant’s survival despite the horrifying circumstances of its birth still speaks of luck and fortune almost too good to be true.

I can just imagine the sort of backstory the baby will tell come adulthood.

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STILL, compared to many other Filipino infants, the baby thrown out the window is very fortunate indeed. For starters, it survived the first critical hours after birth, the most vulnerable period in a baby’s life.

Although child mortality has been declining in recent years here, there are still disturbing conclusions in the first annual report of the National Implementation Team (NIT) of the Department of Health, which is charged with seeing to the successful rollout of programs resulting from the passage of the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health (RPRH) Law.

Though declining, child mortality is being slowed down by high neonatal (newborn) mortality, the report said. The main culprit, according to the report, is “limited access to essential newborn care” which results in “the high number of neonatal deaths.”

The absence of a trained birth attendant (a doctor or midwife) is a fate shared by newborns with their mothers. The same NIT report notes that the persistent high rate of maternal mortality “result(s) from high levels of unmet need for various RPRH services such as modern family planning and safe delivery services for women and mothers.”

As the fate of mothers go, so does the fate of our newborns. Which is why it is foolhardy to talk about or act on child survival in the Philippines without, at the same time, looking after and ensuring the health and survival of their mothers and of the women who will become mothers. Like the mother-and-child pair in that home in a Makati village, the fates of all mothers and of all children are intertwined, bound not just by the umbilical cord, but also by their shared subordinate status in society.

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ACCORDING the United Nations Development Program, over half of births in the country take place at home, with one-third assisted by traditional birth attendants or hilot, who have a lot of handed-down folk knowledge about and experience with childbirth, but are usually not equipped to deal with complications.

Aside from relying on hilot, other factors contribute to our high maternal mortality rates. These include infections due to unclean surroundings or unhygienic practices, lack of transport to ferry the at-risk woman from her home to an accredited facility, the lack of a supply of blood and other essential drugs even in medical facilities, and the poor health status of the woman.

This sorry state of affairs can be traced directly to poverty. The UNDP says that poor women are “greatly disadvantaged with around 75 percent of the poorest quintile (having) no access to skilled birth attendants compared to only 20 percent of the richest quintile.”

The Philippines counts three million pregnancies occurring each year, half of which were unplanned, with one-third ending in abortions. Abortions, says the UNDP, “is one of the leading causes of maternal deaths in the country.” A huge part of the problem is still lack of access to family planning commodities and reproductive health services. For one, the “unmet need” (the desire of women to limit their pregnancies but facing difficulty in accessing contraceptives) remains high.

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A DAY or so after reading the story of the baby thrown out the window, I had occasion to visit a mall for some errands on Mother’s Day.

I was astonished. It was like Christmas, with all the restaurants full, with long queues winding outside them. Everywhere we went, there were families, many of them multi-generational. Many of the older women even carried bouquets.

How touching, I thought (my own daughter in the States had a bouquet delivered). We Filipinos really do love our mothers. But maybe it’s only in the personal sphere. Because the fate of mothers in the Philippines in general is dismal at best, as exemplified perhaps by the housemaid who delivered her baby by her lonesome, more terrified of the consequences of being found out than of the risks to her own survival and that of her child.