• Submitted by: lena campos
• Health and Medicine
• 05 / 10 / 2013

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Cuba is working today to reduce the maternal mortality rate, which in 2012 reached one of the lowest figures in history (21.5 per hundred thousand live births), an expert said here.

Dr. Evelio Cabezas, professor, head of the national group of Gynecology and Obstetrics, told Prensa Latina that with that aim it is developed a national program that is already producing results.

While further decreasing this rate, we will be fulfilling the Millennium Development Goals, based on reducing by three quarters this indicator between 1990 and 2015, the expert told Prensa Latina.

He said the actions that involved in family planning in Cuba have been developed as a sexual and reproductive right criteria based on maternal risk mitigation and support the free exercise of equality.

Access to health services are guaranteed, and full coverage of contraceptives is high, and we also promote education activities, promotion and dissemination of sexual and reproductive health through healthy behavior styles, avoiding risk behaviors, said he .

However, he stressed that despite this, the teen pregnancy, which may have serious consequences for health and social life of the girls, and their descendants, is now a growing problem in the country.

Sex education is important. We must lose our fear, we must speak to teenagers about sexual problems and risks, including teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Parents, schools and the media can play an important role in this, said Cabezas, during the 15 Congress of Gynecology and Obstetrics in session in Havana.

As part of the meeting, which is held in the Palace of Conventions in Havana with some 500 delegates from a dozen nations, it is also in sessions the Congress of Perinatology and Family Planning, Child and Adolescent Gynaecology and Reproductive Health of Adolescents.

Source: Prensa Latina