MONROVIA, Liberia (WOMENSENEWS)--A small group of reporters huddled around Roseline Broh, a nurse midwife supervisor, at the entrance to the labor ward at Redemption Hospital here. The facility provides free services and some of its 200 beds hold as many as three patients.

The group was suddenly pushed aside as emergency workers rushed past, carrying a pregnant woman on a stretcher. The woman, covered by only a sheet, was having a seizure.

Broh said the woman had eclampsia, a life-threatening complication of pregnancy caused by very high blood pressure.

When asked if the woman would survive, Broh's somber expression contrasted with her cheery scrubs, which were patterned with rosy-cheeked smiley faces, sheep and hearts. Broh said she wasn't sure.

Between 400 and 425 pregnant women come through the hospital's doors each month, said Broh. Two of those women die every month.

The patient having a seizure typifies many of the hospital's expectant mothers, said Melvin Johnson, Redemption Hospital's nursing coordinator. "Lots of mothers stay home until they're in critical condition."

To help lower the country's high rate of maternal deaths, the government of Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has welcomed life-saving projects and asked for regular updates on the results.

One of the projects, aimed at shortening the distance between expectant mothers and health facilities, begins this week.

The first of seven planned "maternity waiting homes" in Bong County, in north-central Liberia, is scheduled to open its doors. The homes are being built near clinics staffed with qualified health professionals.

The four-roomed structure--with an outside bathroom, kitchen area and screened porch--can house up to eight women. Any woman may check in for up to three weeks before her expected delivery date. The focus, however, is on women in riskier groups, such as those in their first pregnancy, those with suspected complications or those who've had more than five births. Women with serious complications will be sent to the hospital instead of staying at the home.

Family Planning Key

The home will be run by a traditional birth attendant who will encourage communal cooking and teach the women about their health, family planning, exclusive breastfeeding and birth spacing.

"Family planning is a component," said Laura O'Hara, senior health program coordinator in the Monrovia office of Africare, the nongovernmental organization behind the project. "If you give women a choice and the supplies needed for choices in a country like this, you can see decreases in maternal mortality by 20 percent. Birth spacing occurs, women have choices and women and babies are healthier. It's one of the most significant things you can do."

Six more maternity waiting homes are planned for other parts of Bong County, the part of Liberia where patients must travel the furthest to reach a facility, says O'Hara. The second home should be ready by the end of the month. O'Hara says she hopes all the homes, which are being funded by USAID's Child Survival Innovation Grant, will be built by the end of April.

To help determine the effectiveness of these homes, researchers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Africare's partner, will over the next four years compare the birth outcomes of women in the seven homes with women in six other areas in Bong County without such homes.

The project is also training 130 traditional birth attendants and certified midwives to use cell phones to text data about maternal and infant health to a central site, providing better data to work with in the future. That training begins in mid-February.

In a special November briefing with the Liberian president, Sirleaf told visiting reporters that the government knew it needed better data.

"Maternal mortality, we're still working on that and trying to get better figures," she said. "And as we try to expand services through rural areas, the midwifery program has been enhanced, because that's part of the problem. Training midwives we think will also help to address that problem."

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