Native women get pregnancy support

OTTAWA • Health Minister Jane Philpott says Ottawa will now pay for someone to travel with indigenous women who need to leave their communities to give birth — a change to what she called an “extremely unhelpful” policy.

In an interview with The Canadian Press, Philpott said she heard a “cry loud and clear” from indigenous health experts who were urging the federal government to allow pregnant aboriginal women to leave home with an escort.

“It is a major policy change for us,” Philpott said. “It requires significant resources ... but it is absolutely a wise investment.”

Indigenous women without proof of a medical need to have someone escort them have long been forced to have their children alone and far from their land, language and heritage, the minister said.

“There are a whole bunch of negative outcomes of that,” Philpott said. “What happens at birth has an impact on the rest of peoples’ lives for the whole family.”

Philpott said northern Manitoba doctors told her of women who were so terrified to travel alone that they would hide to avoid having their pregnancy discovered, only to present themselves at the last minute in communities ill-prepared for deliveries. Too often, the cries heard in aboriginal communities were cries of death, not birth, she added.

“That set me on a path to be able to return the cries of birth in communities as much as possible,” she said, noting a recent $83-million budget investment for maternal and child health for First Nations and Inuit.