It is difficult to imagine a maternity ward where the lights may not work, where gloves are unavailable, where medicines must be purchased by families before treatment can begin and where clinicians are forced to improvise with whatever they can find.
For Angela Gorman, MBE, these were not abstract examples of underfunded healthcare. They were realities she witnessed firsthand during the humanitarian journey documented in WOMANSLAUGHTER: A Personal Journey Through The Tragedy of Maternal Mortality.
Her book takes readers beyond statistics and into hospitals where the difference between life and death could depend on something as basic as electricity, a pair of gloves or a few tablets of essential medication.
When the Lights Go Out in a Maternity Unit
One of Gorman’s most disturbing experiences came during a nighttime visit to a hospital in Chad.
She entered a maternity area lit by a kerosene lamp. In another room, four women were in advanced labour, being cared for by a single midwife. There was no functioning electric light. A candle stood in the middle of the room and the midwives were using carrier bags as makeshift gloves because proper protective equipment was unavailable.
Gorman later learned that the hospital did have a generator, but when fuel ran out, staff had no choice but to return to lamps and candles.
For someone who had spent years working within the UK healthcare system, the contrast was overwhelming.
Medicine Exists, but Can Patients Afford It?
Another reality Gorman encountered repeatedly was that treatment might technically be available but still remain out of reach.
During one visit to Chad, she met a woman suffering from pre-eclampsia. The woman needed treatment and later required a caesarean section, but her husband did not have enough money for basic IV fluids and needles. Her baby had already died. Gorman and her companions paid for the necessary items so that the mother could undergo surgery and return home to her other children.
The cost was small by Western standards. For the family, however, it determined whether a wife and mother survived.
That moment captures one of the central themes of WOMANSLAUGHTER: the tragedy is not always that medicine does not exist. Sometimes it exists just a few metres away, but poverty stands between the patient and the treatment.
Basic Equipment Can Save a Life
Gorman also witnessed serious shortages in newborn care.
At one hospital, she found an adult resuscitation bag positioned for use with newborn babies. In her clinical experience, using equipment designed for adults could cause severe harm to an infant’s lungs. Gorman and her team had brought an appropriate neonatal resuscitation bag, which they were able to leave with the maternity staff.
These scenes reveal why WOMANSLAUGHTER is such a confronting read. Gorman does not describe healthcare inequality in vague terms. She shows what inequality looks like inside a labour ward.
It looks like candles instead of reliable electricity.
It looks like plastic carrier bags instead of gloves.
It looks like families searching for money while a patient waits for medicine.
And it looks like trained healthcare workers being asked to save lives without the tools they need.
A Book About What Should Never Be Normal
Gorman’s experiences eventually became part of a much larger mission through Life for African Mothers. Over roughly two decades, she records that the organisation supplied more than six million Misoprostol tablets across parts or all of seven countries, helping provide lifesaving medication free of charge to around two million women.
But WOMANSLAUGHTER is not simply a record of humanitarian work.
It is a challenge to readers.
What should we consider unacceptable in modern healthcare? And how many preventable deaths must occur before shortages of medicine, equipment, electricity and basic supplies are treated with the urgency they deserve?
Angela Gorman’s story makes those questions impossible to ignore.
Read WOMANSLAUGHTER: A Personal Journey Through The Tragedy of Maternal Mortality by Angela Gorman, MBE: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H8FKFQBZ
