With health rights denied, a woman dies
“Misriya” lay in a Tanzanian hospital’s delivery room. All around her was the noise and activity of women giving birth, bringing life into the world, but she was beyond that. Misriya, who was HIV-positive, had died in childbirth the day before, but amidst the delivery ward’s chaos, her body hadn’t been moved. An IV remained in her arm. That’s when Alicia Yamin noticed a bundle on a nearby windowsill. It moved when she touched it. The woman’s baby, untended since birth, was still there, struggling to live. Yamin, director of the Program on the Health Rights of Women and Children at the Harvard School of Public Health’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights (FXB), alerted the hospital staff and made sure the family, waiting outside, got the child so the infant could be cared for. Yamin shared lessons from the experience on Monday during the opening session of a weeklong executive...