I have a guest-post for you today from a finalist in the Fresh Voices category in the Britmums Brilliance in Blogging Awards. Ruth, blogs over at DorkyMum, and wants to share with you the Save The Children: Blog It For Babies campaign.
Blog It For Babies
If you're a parent blogger, I'd say there's a very good chance that at some point in your life you've had to give some thought to giving birth. You may not have gone to NCT classes, or swotted up on every single birthing book out there, but you'll still have been aware of your choices, and made decisions based on those choices.
Do you remember the anxious excitement of writing a birth plan (even if you only wrote it as a mental list in your head)? What an overwhelming number of options we have if we're giving birth in this country. Do we want a homebirth or a hospital birth? Who will our birth partner be? Will we have a birthing pool? What if we go overdue? When will we agree to being induced? How will we get through early labour – a TENS machine? Paracetamol? (Yes, I laughed when the midwife suggested that too…). Will we use gas and air? How do we feel about epidurals? Episiotomies? Do we want the cord clamped? What happens if we have a caesarean?
Crikey. What a lot to think about. There are so many choices.
No wonder we all feel a bit stressed and overwhelmed if we're due to give birth. No wonder we set such high expectations for ourselves in terms of having the 'perfect' birth, and no wonder that so many of us then have such mixed emotions if things don't go to plan.
But let's look at it another way. How lucky we are to have those choices available to us, and to be in a position to make informed decisions. How lucky we are to live somewhere where we know that even if our birth plan goes out of the window, we are very likely to end the process with a healthy baby, delivered in a clean and safe environment. How lucky we are to know that if our babies are born needing any kind of medical attention, there will be qualified doctors on hand to provide it.
There are thousands of women in the world who do not live with that knowledge, and do not have that guarantee.
There are women in Bangladesh like Panna, who has given birth four times, but only had two of her babies survive, and women like Shipra, who has also given birth four times, but who lost three of those babies within hours or days of their birth.
Only 18% of births in Bangladesh have a trained health worker present. And 1 in 19 children in Bangladesh will not live to see their 5th Birthday, due to a lack of basic healthcare.
What is frustrating is that it doesn't have to be that way.
Save the Children already have the knowledge and experience that will allow them to help women like Panna and Shipra. Now all they need is the funding.
The Build it for Babies campaign is a £1 million appeal that will allow Save the Children to build seven life-saving clinics in the poorest parts of Bangladesh. You can find out more about the appeal on their website – there are so many ways to get involved, and every single penny counts.
You can select Build it for Babies as your charity of choice to support through BritMums For Good whilst shopping via Give As You Live.
You can also pay a visit to Save The Children's Build it for Babies virtual clinic microsite: www.savethechildren.org.uk/
Here's a few of the items you'll find on the Build it for Babies shopping list:
- £5 can buy a brick – without which there will quite simply be no health centres
- £14 can buy a set of scales for weighing babies
- £49 could buy a delivery kit, a complete set of equipment for delivering babies safely
- £150 could pay for a paramedic for a month to treat acutely ill children
- £1,000 could buy a year's supply of emergency medical kits to help mothers with difficult deliveries
- £2,500 can help build a well to provide clean water for the clinic and keep families safe from deadly diseases.
Let's get involved, and help give the women of Bangladesh the same support that we had when we were pregnant and giving birth.
