Women's health: an alternative perspective for choosing interventions.

This paper outlines the health problems of mothers, discusses the links between maternal health and child health, and emphasizes the need to focus attention more clearly on the problems of women and the interventions that might help them as a way to improve both maternal and child health. The special problems of girls and women in the developing world--including maternity care, abortion, and maternal mortality and morbidity--and the ways in which these problems affect mothers and their children, are examined. Nutritional morbidity and infectious morbidity are described in terms of their effects on maternal and infant health, including low birth weight. It is shown how the cultural, social, and economic factors that affect women and children interact with their health problems. Recommendations are made to: reexamine well established interventions to determine if new program designs might improve long-term results; conduct research on the efficacy of retraining health personnel; broaden and improve service delivery; reassess the cost-effectiveness of highly targeted interventions; reexamine the locus of certain interventions; and emphasize long-term as well as short-term results. Attention should be given to women's health not only during pregnancy, but throughout the life cycle.