Scores of pregnant women in Kumasi, the Ashanti regional capital, are facing the ordeal of working to take care of their ante-natal care and other pressing needs before delivery, after their spouses dumped them.
It was pathetic, as some of these unfortunate women opened up before the cameras of the media as they lamented about how their spouses neglected them and even vanished into thin air after their women told them that they had taken seeds.
Some of them said they are now left with no other option than to beg on the streets in order to get food to eat on daily basis, with some of them whose pregnancies have reached nine months, disclosing that they were yet to attend their first ante-natal care.
These horrible revelations came to light during the official launching of the Easy Birth Foundation, a non-governmental organisation whose main objective is to support poor pregnant women so that they could be properly taken care of for safe delivery.
One of the unfortunate pregnant women, 20-year-old Ophelia Agyapomaah, a native of Sabronum in the Brong Ahafo Region, said she is very poor so she relies on left-overs of people in the house she stays at Ayigya Zongo in Kumasi before she could eat.
She said her fiancé, one Eric Owusu Baffoe, a welder by profession who used to stay at Ayigya Zongo, absconded immediately he put her (Agyapomaah) in a family way, bemoaning that she had since been struggling in life, adding, “I have not attended ante-natal care even though I am nine months pregnant.”
Easy Birth Foundation which has been formed to take proper care of such poor pregnant women is co-owned by Elizabeth Agyeman, Oforikrom Member of Parliament (MP), and Dr Gladys Norley Ashitey, ex-MP for Ledzokuku in the Greater Accra Region.
Madam Agyeman stated that such disheartening occurrences whereby men fled after they had impregnated women influenced their decision to form the NGO so that they could use their expertise in parliament so as to help to ensure that such women delivered peacefully.
Dr Ashitey who is also an ex-deputy minister of health during the NPP regime said maternal deaths were on the rise in the country lately, attributing the deplorable trend to situations whereby men abandoned their spouses.
Emmanuel Amankwa of the Biochemistry Department of the KNUST in Kumasi disclosed that 380 maternal deaths are recorded in every 100,000 births in the country, pointing out that the “statistics is unacceptable”, calling on the need for the populace to collaborate to reverse the trend.
As part of the official launching of the NGO at the Georgia Hotel in Kumasi on Monday afternoon, a health screening exercise was administered freely for over 300 pregnant women in Kumasi and its nearby areas.
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