Monday, July 26, 2004 Amante: A prayer for Elijah By ISOLDE D. AMANTE
LAST week, my nephew died.
We hadn’t expected to meet him until late August, but were so eager for his birth that all of the family’s plans were made with the boy in mind. He even had a name and a personality, at least in his eager family’s heads. I pictured him toddling around the house in squeaky shoes.
The baby was a bellydancer, rarely still: my sister-in-law’s face lit up with every wave. “A creel of eels, all ripples,” wrote Sylvia Plath. “Jumpy as a Mexican bean.” After his last ultrasound, my mother called me up with the news — “It’s going to be Elijah Neil!” — and amid all the chaos and carnage that made up the news of the day, I thought all was right with the world.
Last week, when we learned that his doctor couldn’t hear a heartbeat, we hoped there had been some mistake. We waited two nights in the hospital lobby, and made our bargains with God. When Elijah was finally delivered, I sent a prayer that was equal parts thanksgiving, for my sister-in-law’s safety; supplication, for my family’s strength; and inquiry.
Lord, I prayed, You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.
The scientific explanations aren’t enough, you see. Yes, we learn that umbilical cord accidents are the most common cause of intrauterine fetal death (IUFD) in the third trimester. Yes, we are told that despite medical advances, up to 12 percent of all stillbirths today still defy explanation.
But science offers no comfort. It can’t tell us why this baby didn’t survive, when my sister-in-law and brother had taken every possible precaution for his safety. Almost every week, we hear news of infants being dumped in garbage bins: they survive for a few hours, despite their mothers’ contempt. Why wasn’t this one spared, when he had a home and a future waiting for him?
It could be worse, I think. And, in fact, it is. The Philippines scores below average in the ability to provide emergency obstetric care, according to a survey conducted in 49 countries. For that survey, reproductive health experts rated each country’s services from zero to 100 and came up with a maternal and neonatal program effort index (MNPI).
The overall average score for 49 countries was 56. So was the score for the Philippines. We earned above-average marks for encouraging mothers to breastfeed and for providing access, at least in urban areas, to safe services.
“But as in most developing countries, maternal and neonatal health services in the Philippines face resource shortages, particularly in terms of government allocations and free services,” the MNPI report says.
Each year, up to 4,900 women and girls in the country are killed by pregnancy-related complications. The tragedy is that, unlike our loss, these could have been prevented with access to information and affordable, efficient care. The real tragedy is that our loss is needlessly repeated.
Elijah would have been a tall boy, just like his father. He was perfect in every respect: “Right, like a well-done sum. A clean slate, with his own face on.”
We have laid him to rest beside his grandfather Ely, both of them sheltered by a hedge of yellow flowers. Somehow, the thought of them together is comforting, as is the thought that only molecular time has ended, and they have moved on to another time entirely, too strange and too vast for the human mind to comprehend.
(e-mail: ida@sunstar.com.ph)
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