COLOMBIA: Black Communities Organise in Country’s Poorest Region
By Constanza Vieira and Diana Cariboni
QUIBDÓ, Colombia, Jan 9 (IPS) - During the "high season" of popular festivals in Colombia’s Chocó region, "pregnant girls as young as 13 start flowing in," says a nursing assistant in the obstetrics department at the hospital of the provincial capital, Quibdó.
The fiesta of San Pancho - as Saint Francis of Assisi, the city’s patron saint, is known - is a two-week festival that begins on Sept. 20, with traditional music, abundant drinking, dancing and street processions of comparsas or conga bands through the neighbourhoods.
Not long afterwards, "we have around 50 cases of abortion complications a week," the nursing assistant told IPS, saying she had even seen 10-year-old girls with complications from back-street abortions. (As in most of Latin America, abortion is illegal in Colombia except in cases in which the mother’s life is in danger, the foetus is badly deformed or the pregnancy was a result of rape.)
In Colombia’s Pacific coast region, where Chocó is located, the proportion of young women who got pregnant between the ages of 15 and 19 grew from 17.5 percent in 1990 to 23 percent in 2000, according to official figures.
In the rundown public hospital in Quibdó, which carries the name of the town’s patron saint, there are only 26 beds, and many women have to lie "on benches or on the floor." In addition, "there are hardly any materials," said the nursing assistant.
The maternal mortality rate in the Chocó region is the country’s highest: 409 per 100,000 live births in 2001 - more than four times the national average.
The region also has some of the worst national indicators in terms of poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, maternal and child health, and gender equality - nearly all of the areas covered by the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), adopted by the international community in 2000.
Years ago, in 1990, the Journal of Tropical Pediatrics published "Women and Health in Chocó, Colombia", a study carried out between 1979 and 1988.
It reported that the average size of a family in the province, one of Colombia's poorest, where 90 percent of inhabitants are black and most of the rest are indigenous, was 7.5 children per woman, and that women over 45 had had an average of nine pregnancies.
At that time, 22 percent of households were headed by women on their own, and since women had less access to land in this rural region, the female-headed households "faced increased economic risks."
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