NO WOMAN LEFT BEHIND

A personal account of the crusade to improve worldwide childbirth practices.

In this memoir, Grant, founding CEO of the Fistula Foundation, recounts her experiences traveling the world working under the aegis of U.S. Agency for International Development and other organizations to assess the state of women’s health care and pregnancy aid throughout low-income countries. The Fistula Foundation, founded in 2000 to support the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia, is dedicated to combating a terrible but treatable condition that afflicts many postpartum women who have limited access to health care. The author reminds her readers that in places like Rajasthan or Somaliland, there’s no running water, toilets, cars, or much medical technology. The grim reality of these women’s lives is reflected in an African proverb Grant hears—“The sun should not set twice on a laboring woman”—since the baby can die in the uterus after a day from a lack of oxygenated blood, and the mother can develop a fistula as the baby’s head cuts off blood supply to the pelvic floor. Grant’s account addresses problems like lack of basic medical care and the widespread practice of female genital mutilation. She talks with a variety of figures, including “the Muslim Mother Teresa” Edna Adan, a tireless advocate against FGM. The stories Grant recounts, women facing childbirth with no modern medicine, are always moving and often harrowing; by sharing their voices, she personalizes the issue. This makes some of her editing decisions frustrating, particularly the extent to which her narrative swerves into movie-of-the-week personal details that distract from the main subject. She writes about how she went on a blind date with somebody who “looked a bit like Alec Baldwin about the time he starred in 30 Rock,” for instance. Fortunately, this descriptive habit sometimes works (“A shadow fell across the open desert and soon seemed to devour us in darkness”), and Grant’s passion carries the bulk of the narrative forward.

A knowledgeable, powerful, and personal look at the women’s health issues in the least developed countries.