Beyond stillbirth, shame: Women with a fistula

By Elana Ringler

BAHIR DAR, Ethiopia (Reuters) - Thirty-year-old Alem wears two small bags of perfumed soap around her neck to mask the stench of urine and feces that has accompanied her for 10 years since she suffered a fistula.

The childbirth injury almost unheard of in the developed world still afflicts as many as two million women in the developing world.

Obstetric fistula is caused by prolonged labor which forces the unborn baby's head against a woman's pelvis -- killing the baby and destroying the trapped tissue in the birth canal, the rectum and the urinary tract.

Alem, whose name doctors have changed to preserve her anonymity, says the smell caused her husband to divorce her and her family to shun her.

Standing outside a specialist clinic in the impoverished northern Ethiopian town of Bahir Dar, Alem recalls the traumatic labor which killed her baby and wrecked her bladder and her rectum.

"I tried to cure myself in holy water but my body was already swollen and the baby had already died," she says.

For the sufferer, the grief of coming to terms with a still-born child is compounded by the misery of losing control of bodily functions.

"They can't hold any urine in themselves, so they smell, they're ashamed, usually the husbands divorce them, the families reject them and they live a life of poverty and misery and being an outcast for the rest of their lives," said Dr Andrew Browning, an Australian gynecologist who has been working at the fistula clinic here for two years.