Who will help the mothers?

THE EDITOR, Madam:

Rev Ronald Thwaites highlights the deeper issues of the declining birth rate and the affordability of housing. I would like to add my story to the discussion.

I grew up on captured land in Mammee Bay, St Ann, until we were regularised. Over the years, I watched as we first lost access to the beaches with Old Fort Bay and Sandals. Then came RIU and the fishing village, which also doubled as a craft-selling spot whenever vendors were lucky enough to attract tourists who wandered across the divide. That divide is now fenced off and is being developed by Sandals. We now have to go elsewhere and pay to access a beach, all in the name of development and the tourism product of St Ann, Jamaica.

My mother, who had seven children with multiple partners and no father present in our lives, got up six days a week to work at the craft shop, and we still struggled. I went to high school, did my best, and achieved despite the odds and the feeling of not belonging.

In Manchester, nobody knew me, my parents, or my relatives, so I had no opportunities. The one thing I achieved was becoming a trained and certified midwife. Yet, after working through the awful COVID-19 pandemic for four years, I was still not permanent enough within the government service to qualify for study leave. I resigned from my job and am now struggling through NCU. God bless the Students’ Loan Bureau and my partner.

I am the mother of a four-year-old son. As a midwife, I have seen babies living in substandard conditions, in houses where you cannot stand upright or even walk freely, because of the state of the wooden floors. I have seen women who could not afford the $200 birth registration fee and were forced to change the baby’s name back to what the father wanted. I have heard women cry in labour, with and without pain medication. I have seen mothers grieve babies who should not have died. I have seen women refuse to look at a newborn because the child was being left in the care of the State.

There is nothing to sustain the current birth rate, let alone increase it. The opportunity was not given to me, to their mothers, or to their fathers. Please tell me, who will give it to them?

SH