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Difficult births

Certified midwife Sera Bonds, pictured here in Sri Lanka, helps women and children in crisis all over the world.

Photo:Circle of Health International

January 2005, Punochchimunai, Sri Lanka: Water everywhere; fish nowhere. Houses in rubble; hospitals, too, though one clinic is left standing, and it’s here that the pregnant women come. Many have lost children, husbands, friends, homes. Before the tsunami, 5,000 people lived in this village. Now there are 2,000. These women are the survivors, and Sera Bonds has come with 11 midwives, nurses and trauma specialists on behalf of Circle of Health International (CoHI), the women’s health advocacy group she founded, to help mothers and babies survive this crisis and to leave local health workers better able to help them.

Not even a year later, there’s more water and rubble; more hospitals are down. This time the crisis is in the U.S., after Hurricane Katrina, and still women and babies need help. Bonds takes CoHI there, too. And to Tibet, Tanzania and now, Sudan.

Bonds, who studied public health and is a certified midwife, founded CoHI in 2003 to serve the health needs of women in areas of “conflict and crisis.” These women take a double hit, she explains, “first by the disaster, then by the lack of support” for their needs, including giving birth safely and being protected from assault in refugee camps.

That covers the crisis part. In areas of conflict, like Israel/Palestine, where Bonds makes her home, women suffer uniquely, too. For instance, some 90 Palestinian women have given birth alone at border checkpoints because they were refused entry into Israel en route to a clinic. Bonds is working against the odds to get Israeli and Palestinian midwives on the same side of the fence, in the same room.

At her core, Bonds is a peace activist, and says the decision to work with midwives was hardly accidental. “Midwives are leaders in their communities, they’re the women we trust, they lead us through transition in our lives,” says Bonds. “They are these things to women all over the world.” There’s a famous saying, “Peace on Earth begins with birth.” Bonds is a believer.