Emergency Delivery Kits Now on the Field

The time of pregnancy and giving birth can be very joyful, but is also a precarious time for many women. Particularly those who have no access to safe maternity care have reason to fear the time of childbirth. Worldwide, still far too many women sustain life changing injuries or even die as a result of giving birth, and many babies are stillborn or die of infections after birth.

Together with a BTJ doctor on our team, we have developed delivery kits, especially for use in areas where there is no access to safe maternity care. They contain essentials for a sterile delivery environment, and for the first care given to the newborn. But of course, it is important to know how to use these materials.

Last week, we received a beautiful photo of a maternity training in rural India. Two maternity nurses had travelled to a remote area, to train community health care workers in the basics of safe child delivery and give each of them a BTJ delivery kit. They were surprised at the quality of the materials, which was better than those they had seen in government clinics.

A local pastor also gave Bible teaching and provided each of the community health workers with a Bible. Women who are about to give birth do not only seek medical care but also spiritual comfort. Many cultures have rituals where women ask the gods for safe delivery and make sacrifices to the gods to please them.

This is nothing new. In ancient Ephesus, Artemis was the midwife goddess to which women turned for help in childbirth. Some scholars think that this is the background of the mysterious verse where Paul writes “she will be saved through childbearing” (1 Tim 2:15). Christian women did not have to turn to idols, but could entrust the lives of themselves and their children to God.

As well as giving women the practical means to make childbirth safer, we also want to point them to the living God who can give them strength and comfort through the painful and precarious experience of giving birth. A God who “carries the lambs close to His heart and gently leads those that are with young” (Isaiah 40:11)