Safe Motherhood for All Inc is a community organisation bound together by a common goal: to ensure that pregnancy, childbirth and the transition to motherhood is safe and to promote health and wellbeing for all women.
A healthy, strong and confident mother gives a baby the best start at birth, influencing the long-term wellness of herself, her child and our community. Therefore we need mothers to be well physically, emotionally and culturally.
Irrespective of their socioeconomic setting all pregnant women and their babies during pregnancy, childbirth and the postnatal period have a right to optimal woman-centred care, through a holistic, human rights-based approach that provides a respectful birth experience and positive outcome.
MHM campaigns to uphold the rights of all women to be safe and healthy before, during and after childbirth, and to ensure that they realise their human rights, through the adoption of The Respectful Maternity Care Charter: the Universal Rights of Childbearing Women.
Respectful maternity care (RMC) is quality care that focuses on a woman’s basic human rights, that recognises her autonomy, dignity, feelings, choices, and preferences. Furthermore, cultural, emotional, social, psychological and spiritual safety, are important components of RMC. Without respectful maternity care the safety of mothers and babies is being compromisedon a routine basis. Women need responsive, sensitive maternity care systems that cater for her needs and respect for her human rights. No matter the context, every woman has the right to experience respectful maternity care.
Many women in Australia have access to antenatal, birth and post-natal care resulting in positive outcomes for both mother and baby. Unfortunately, however, for groups who experience disadvantage such as; young women; women with a disability; women with culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds; and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women the experience can be a vastly different. For example, the perinatal death rate of babies born to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mothers in 2015 was one third higher than that of other babies.
As, the foundations for health are laid early in life and are influenced by genetic, behavioural and environmental factors, a commitment is required to not only recognise the unequal access to conditions and resources that support health but also to address the social systems, that reproduce these inequalities.
