Vesico- and Recto-Vaginal Fistulas
At the same age as Swiss girls start their final years in school or begin an apprenticeship and experience their first romances, thousands of young women, especially in Africa, already have to live through terribly painful labour without any medical help.
A pelvis that is not fully developed or in some way bent, or an awkward position of the baby can mean that labour goes on for a long time, sometimes for 5 days or more. During these days, the young mother experiences unbelievable pain and agony, which often results in a stillbirth.
The constant pressure of the baby’s head into the pelvis and the birth channel means that the blood circulation is disturbed, creating lesions in the tissues around that area. An opening then develops between the bladder and the vagina, and sometimes between the vagina and the rectum. Urine and sometimes fecal matter cannot be controlled anymore, which means that a bad, humiliating smell follows the woman everywhere she goes.
The consequences of such childbirth injuries are a catastrophe for the women concerned. They suffer constant pain due to infections. In addition to coping with the loss of their baby, these women are often abandoned by their husbands, avoided by the people of their own village and forced into isolation. Often the problem is misinterpreted as a sexually transmitted disease, for which the woman herself is to blame.
WHO reckons that 2 Million women in Third World Countries suffer from childbirth injuries, and that the number increases by 50’000 – 100’000 every year. Poverty, malnutrition, hard physical work, no education, too few Health Centres, long distances, no transportation, marriage and circumcision of young girls, discrimination of women – these are all factors that have something to do with obstetric fistulas.
In many Third World Countries, the woman’s role is to satisfy the sexual needs of her husband, to give birth to children, and to work hard in the house and in the fields. Childbirth injuries make it impossible for a woman to fulfill these duties, therefore her self-respect and self-confidence are destroyed. The mere right to exist in the village society is put into question.
