'Dee Of MedPlug

This week the language police joined the argument. Pregnancy only feels like a death sentence, they say, and a feeling is not a fact. Fine. Let us do the English properly. In its plain sense, a death sentence is a court's order that a person be put to death. Nigeria's courts have passed one on more than 3,000 people now sitting in our prisons. None has been executed since 2016, largely because governors will not sign the warrants. Taken literally, Nigeria's own death sentence has not killed anyone in nearly a decade. Pregnancy passes no judgment and waits for no signature. About 75,000 Nigerian women died from pregnancy or childbirth in 2023, by UN estimate. That is roughly one woman every seven minutes. Tell me again which of the two is the figure of speech. To be fair, in some countries the phrase would be terrible English. Norway is one of them. Maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births (UN estimates, 2023) Norway 1 Australia 2 Germany 4 Sweden 4 UK 8 Canada 12 Cyprus 14 Egypt 17 USA 17 Malaysia 26 Libya 59 Morocco 70 Angola 183 Ghana 234 Nigeria 993 No, that last one is not a typo. Nigeria's figure is nearly a thousand times Norway's, about 250 times Sweden's and Germany's, and nearly 60 times that of the USA, the worst of the rich countries here. The African comparison is harder on us. Egypt, Libya and Morocco all sit in double figures. Ghana, down the coast, records about a quarter of ours. Angola, an oil producer like us, records about a fifth. Of the fifteen countries on that list, ours is where the phrase is least of an exaggeration. Somewhere in Nigeria, as you read this, a woman is bleeding while the language police correct the English. 🐝🐆

This week a woman said pregnancy felt like a death sentence for her. She was told a death sentence means certain death. Now the argument has shifted, and "feels like" is allowed while "is" is bad English. Ask anyone who remembers HIV before antiretroviral drugs came to Nigeria. For years we called an HIV diagnosis a death sentence. Many lived long after theirs. The phrase described the odds, and people understood it. The odds changed in 1996, when combination therapy arrived. In Nigeria they changed from the 2000s, as treatment began reaching the people who needed it. Today we say HIV is no longer a death sentence, and we mean that too. CNN, France 24 and a US university hospital have all put the phrase in their headlines. CNN's reads "When HIV was a death sentence". The verb is "was", with no "felt like" in sight. An HIV patient picks up their drugs free at government-approved facilities. A woman in labour usually gets a bill. The emergency caesarean announced as free in 2024 covers only poor women, and only those already on national health insurance. About nine in ten Nigerians have none. About one woman still dies here for every 100 births. HIV shed the phrase when its care became free and close at hand. Give every woman in labour skilled care on the same terms, and pregnancy will shed it too. Until then, the English stands. 🐝🐆