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MADRE Programs in Palestine

MADRE's work in Palestine began in 1991, with support for a Palestinian kindergarten in the city of Nablus. In 2007, MADRE launched a partnership with the Palestinian Medical Relief Society (PMRS). The Safe Birth Project supports Palestinian women's right to high-quality, respectful reproductive health services, which is routinely violated by Israeli occupation policies.

Ensuring Safe and Healthy Home Births

In Palestine, Israeli military violence, extensive road closures, military checkpoints, and protracted curfews prevent women in labor from reaching hospitals. Increasingly, women give birth at home, without a skilled birth attendant.

Together, MADRE and the Palestinian Medical Relief Society are responding to this problem with a program that:

• provides delivery kits to local clinics, which are sometimes more accessible to women in labor than hospitals.
• trains community health workers on how to assist birthing women.
• runs a network of mobile women's health clinics, staffed by health workers trained in obstetric emergencies, midwives, and traditional birth attendants. Often, local midwives are able to give delivery assistance to women when other healthcare providers cannot reach them due to closures, checkpoints, and curfews. Whenever possible, PMRS doctors travel to assist birthing women at home, to help ensure that they have safe and healthy home deliveries.
• offers over-the-phone consultations. During times of closure and curfew—when leaving home means taking the risk of being shot—telephone lines often became the only way for women to seek help. Over-the-phone consultations assist women giving birth by offering guidance, labor support, and medical advice.

The Maythaloun Birthing Center

The Maythaloun Birthing Center is located in the northern West Bank community of Maythaloun, serving a population of about 28,000 people.

The Birthing Center helps ensure that Palestinian women have a safe and joyful experience of childbirth. The Center strives to create an atmosphere of security and comfort despite the violence that often rages outside. The sanctuary of the Birth Center allows women to labor and birth with greater peace of mind. The safe and warm environment often means less need for medical intervention and a more positive childbirth experience for women and their families.

The Birthing Center provides a home-like atmosphere for maternity care including prenatal, labor, delivery, and postnatal care in medically uncomplicated pregnancies. The Birthing Center helps foster women's ownership of the process of pregnancy, labor, and birth, and encourages the local community to take control of their own health needs.

In a context in which 85 percent of women experience childbirth without complications, birthing centers represent an effective, low-cost, local solution. The Birthing Center is a primary healthcare facility. It is not part of a hospital, though it is located within 30 minutes of one, in case of emergencies. The Birthing Center helps reduce maternal and neonatal mortality and morbidity by freeing up space in over-burdened hospitals for high-risk births.

The Birthing Center:

• Ensures safe deliveries, despite Israeli policies that prevent women in labor from reaching hospitals.
• Reduces unnecessary hospitalization for deliveries, thereby lessening the burden on hospitals, and often improving women's experiences of childbirth.
• Improves the quality of care given to women and newborns.
• Provides comprehensive and continuous reproductive health services.
• Mobilizes the community and women's organizations to play an active role in improving the health status of women and children.
• Mobilizes women's organizations and health professionals to participate in developing the health system in Palestine.
• Provides lower-cost maternity services than those provided in hospitals.
• Bridges the gap between primary and secondary healthcare service providers by operating an effective referral system between the birthing center and hospitals.
• Encourages the existing primary healthcare service providers in villages to extend their services to their communities by providing maternity care.

Women who come to the Birthing Center receive prenatal care; nutritional counseling for pregnancy; postpartum care; counseling; lab tests; support and assistance during labor and delivery by a skilled birth attendant; medical check-ups during home visits, conducted between three and five days after delivery; and health education on breastfeeding, nutrition, hygiene, baby care, family planning, and postnatal emergencies.