Obstetrical fistula may be one of the oldest pandemics in the world, long forgotten in wealthy nations, but a bitter reality in the poorer countries of the world.  This epidemic does not result from some virulent infection or from violent conflict, but rather from the simple lack of basic healthcare. 

Delivering a child is one of the most dangerous events facing a woman in sub-Saharan Africa.  About one in 47,600 women in Ireland dies during labor. For a woman in Sierra Leone, the risk may be as high as one in six.  This is twice the risk of death facing a Confederate infantryman during America’s bloodiest war. 

For women who survive untreated obstructed labor, terrible injuries can occur.  The unrelenting pressure of the baby’s head within the pelvis of the mother denies blood flow to her pelvic organs.  Tissue dies, leaving large gaps.  The term “Fistula” refers to the abnormal connection between two body organs.  “Obstetric fistula” is the connection between the bladder and vagina (known as vesicovaginal fistula, or VVF), or rectum and vagina that results after loss of this pelvic tissue. 

While Obstructed Labor causes the vast majority of fistulas, there are other factors.  Learn more with this full article.

Because of this abnormal connection, these women are doomed to constant incontinence of urine and often feces, which pours unstoppably into the vagina for the rest of the woman’s life.  Her injuries lead to a cascade of physical, social, and psychological catastrophes, leaving her outcast and enduring unimaginable pain. 

To this day, we have no reliable statistics on the magnitude of this problem.  Certainly there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of women with VVF in the world, with many thousands of new cases each year. 

In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations said: “Everyone has the right to …medical care.  Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance”.  Therefore, we also see fistula as a basic violation of human rights, a call to action to cry out against this injustice. 

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