By Robin Lim, edited by Jim Luce
If you google ‘Christine Jehle Kim,’ you will not find that she was a mother of two who had just been accepted into medical school --or, if things had been different: that she was a mother of three graduated from medical school. But what you will find is that she was memorialized on the Safe Motherhood Quilt Project, the heart-child of midwife Ina May Gaskin. October 16th will mark the twentieth anniversary of my sister’s death.
My sister Christine Jehle Kim died of cardiomyopathy during her pregnancy in
Alabama. I made this block for the Safe Motherhood Quilt Project in her honor.
It was a dark rainy morning. My children were sitting down to breakfast. I was in the garden having just milked Lizziebell, our goat, when my dear friend Margo Berdeshevsky appeared. The look on her face was all I needed to know that someone had asked her to come. Come to tell me something so painful it would shatter my world.
"It’s Christine."
I don’t know how I ended up on my knees in the mud. I’m pretty sure that I tore Margo’s blouse. The scene certainly frightened my children.
"Not my baby sister. No, No, NO!"
Not the baby sister whom my mother had placed into my fifteen-month-old arms with this mandate, "You must protect her. She came down to Earth to be with you."
Courtesy of Amnesty International: Deadly Delivery - The Maternal Health Crisis in the USA.
So, why was I living in Hawaii and she, all grown up, living in Alabama? Like twins conjoined at the heart, hadn’t we slept together nearly every night of our childhood? In middle school our parents gave us twin beds, and placed them on opposite sides of our wonderfully decorated ‘girls’ room. We pushed the beds together and used my father’s old army belts to lash our legs one to the other so that we would not drift apart at night.
Christine Jehle Kim was thirty-two years and nine months -- and pregnant with her third child when she died. But her death began long before then. It began in the winter of 1961 when she was struck down by pneumonia. Her military doctors prescribed large doses of cortisone to strengthen her so that she would ‘pull through.’ Christine returned home so bloated that, to my four and a half year old eyes, she appeared lost inside of herself.
"Where are you Chrissy? Are you in there?"
Chrissy was in there, but she was now twice as large as I remembered her from when they took her away just three weeks before. From that time on, for the rest of her short life, she would struggle with a weight problem diagnosed by doctors as a hormone imbalance. She was poked and prodded, tested, put on crash diets. A balloon was put in her stomach and, at some tragic juncture, doctors stitched up a part of her digestive tract, all to no avail. At any given meal, Christine, though more than double my weight, ate less than half of what I consumed. My sister’s weight problem was iatrogenic. Her weight would contribute to the complication of her pregnancy that would eventually kill her in her sleep.
While I grew up healthy, strong and slim, Christine grew out and was chastised for being ‘Fat-so’. Already marginalized by cruel classmates for being mixed raced kids, it became routine for me to fight off Christine’s persecutors at the school bus stop.
Fast forward twenty years... we can still read the same shameful statistics in Amnesty International’s report Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Health Crisis in the USA. Unfortunately, I ‘can’ imagine the suffering that families experience in the U.S. caused by the loss of the two to three women, mothers, who die every day in pregnancy and childbirth.
The total amount spent on health care in the USA is greater than in any other country in the world (source). Hospitalization related to pregnancy and childbirth costs some US$86 billion a year; the highest hospitalization costs of any area of medicine. Despite this, women in the USA have a greater lifetime risk of dying of pregnancy-related complications than women in 40 other countries. For example, the likelihood of a woman dying in childbirth in the USA is five times greater than in Greece, four times greater than in Germany, and three times greater than in Spain (source).
Deadly Delivery The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA,
Amnesty International Publications 2010
The same Amnesty International report states that maternal mortality ratios have doubled since 1987, and that women of color are more at risk. "Minorities, those living in poverty, Native American, and immigrant women and those who speak little or no English are particularly affected (source)."
If we compare maternal health care in the U.S. with George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Napoleon the pig would say, "All pregnant women are equal -- but some are more equal than others."
My sister, Filipino-Chinese on mother’s side, German-Irish-Native American on father’s side, married a Korean man. My sister’s English was perfect, but her husband was still learning the language. They were a struggling young family and had to tighten their belts just to afford the cost of minimum health-care insurance.
In one of the last long distance phone conversations I had with Christine, she told me that she was expecting a baby. She, her husband Hondo and their two sons, Nick (5) and Gary (3) were elated by the pregnancy. We talked about prenatal nutrition. She pointed out to me that my book that I had been working on, "After The Baby’s Birth... A Woman’s Way To Wellness" (Celestial Arts 10 Speed Press, 1991; order) would be released just in time for her to be one of the first postpartum moms to enjoy it. Christine felt this new baby would be a girl.
"I feel so different this time, somehow I know we are going to have a daughter. I’m going to name her after Mommy, even if she does hate the name Cresencia." She had only one complaint, "I can’t find a midwife that will do my birth. They all risk me out because of my weight. And I keep changing doctors because none of them really cares about me."
My baby sister’s death is a shameful statistic. When Christine and the daughter she was carrying died, I was shattered, but I did not get angry. She taught me that. She wasn’t an angry person. In fact, I cannot recall her even speaking ill of someone, ever. Instead of getting angry, I chose to live my life for love, no compromises. I became a midwife.
Three days ago I stopped a near fatal hemorrhage and yesterday I helped stop a miscarriage. I grumble with concern over the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): #3 Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women; #4 Reduce Child Mortality Rate; and #5 Improve Maternal Health. I must admit to being desperately hopeful that we will achieve these goals by 2015.
Recently, my sister’s son Nick became a father. My sister will never lovingly hold her grandson, and my grandnephew will never know just how amazing his grandmother was. Her love was unnecessarily lost to him, and that is a shameful thing.
With the new Balinese mother, the author celebrates a new member of humanity.
Robin Lim is the founder of the natural birthing clinic in Bali known as Bumi Sehat ("healthy mother earth"). To help do something about achieving the Millennium Development Goals for Mothers and Babies, donate to Bumi Sehat. Contributions to this Indonesian NGO may be made through the Sakthi Foundation, located in Iowa. For further questions and/or information regarding Robin Lim and Bumi Sehat, write Alisa Chazani.
See also:
Balinese Natural Birthing Center Threatened by Global Downturn
Amnesty International Report - Deadly Delivery
Maternal Mortality Fact Sheet
Jim Luce on Health (Stewardship Report)
Jim Luce on Women’s Issues (Stewardship Report)