OPINION: Traditional Birth Assistants: Legal or Illegal, A Blessing Or A Curse?
Series of posers will run through an educated mind on the topic of traditional birth assistants. Most thoughts might go with: “traditional birth assistant are uneducated (western education), what if there are complications, allowing them is too risky”.
Regardless of any opinion, the reality is traditional birth assistant exists in Nigeria and are patronized by many. For the purpose of clarity, traditional birth assistants are those who assist, as doctors and nurses do, in the safe delivery of a pregnant woman without going through medical school or having Western education. They are scattered all around rural communities and villages in Nigeria.
Surprisingly, the Nigerian law acknowledges traditional birth assistants.1
The National Primary Health Care Development Agency Act, supervised by the Federal Ministry of Health, was established to stimulate the growth and development of primary health care in Nigeria.
One of the many important functions of the Agency is paying attention and providing maximum support to the training, development, logistic support of the village health care workers and traditional birth assistants.2
The law acknowledges traditional birth assistants and the recognition merely stops on the face of the law book. The beautifully couched programmes and provisions for primary health care are majorly no where to be found in reality. Traditional birth assistant and village health care workers are to be trained and educated on health care practices according to the Act.
However, traditional birth assistants including village health workers enjoy no such training and other appealing education the National Primary Health Care Agency Act provided.
For the inadequate knowledge of traditional birth assistants, should it be proposed traditional birth assistant be abolished while considering what Bill Gates said on his recent visit to Nigeria that “Nigeria is one of the most dangerous places in the world to give birth, with fourth worst maternal mortality rate in the world ahead of Sierra Leone, Central African Republic and Chad”?
Or for their pristine existence and immeasurable impacts (based on successful deliveries) on the lives of pregnant women in rural areas in Nigeria and rural dwellers, should traditional birth assistants be allowed to continue to ‘practice’?
K.O. Sabit, legal practitioner in employment of Magajin Geri & Co. Taiwo road Ilorin.
roshqos97@gmail.com
