Inioluwa

Lived experience, dismissed. Courtesy, dropped. Professional ethics and plain common sense, thrown out with them. All of it traded to win an argument on this app, while women keep dying in childbirth. This week a woman wrote that pregnancy felt like a death sentence for her. Other women replied under her post describing the same severe sickness. Days without food. Nothing staying down, and barely any water. Vomiting until there was blood, then a hospital bed. The timeline answered with a quarrel over semantics, and some of the corrections came from health workers, statistics in hand. A figure of speech needs no proof. Nobody asks a man to show a burst skull when he says a headache nearly split his head open. A woman who says her pregnancy felt like a death sentence is describing what she lived through, and she is the only witness to what it was like. The whole fight is about a number and a word. How many die, and whether the figure is inflated. Whether a grandmother who had eight children, or a woman not yet 35 with four or five of her own, cancels it out. Whether "death sentence" goes too far when most mothers come home. Ask the husband outside the labour ward whether the number matters. Ask the family that buried mother and baby together, the child whose mother went in to deliver and did not come home, the parents who lost the daughter they raised, the compound that heard the wailing that night. Ask the mothers who survived the birth and whose lives never went back to normal. For each of them the count is one, and one is the whole of it. None of them is arguing over whether "sentence" is too strong a word. Numbers have an honest use. They tell a government where women are dying, how many of those deaths could have been stopped, and whether the budget means what the speeches say. Quoting them at a woman describing her own pregnancy is not among their uses. Argue the figure and the word with the people who hold the money. The government. For the woman in labour tonight, one question matters. Will she come home ??