Readers' comments

Would you like to post a comment ? Be the first to share your thoughts.

Post a comment

Comments are welcomed and encouraged. However, comments not pertaining to the topic or containing slander or offensive language will be deleted. You have to be registered to be able leave your comment. Sign in or Register now for free.

Enlarge Photo

Specialized equipment, such as this at a Yerevan clinic, make it possible to treat infertility.

But: “They managed to prevent the problem in an early stage and I am going to become a mother soon. I regret the lost years. I now advise all the women I know to fearlessly address the specialists,” she says.

Georgi Poghosyan, director of the department for reproductive health at the Center for Healthcare and Family Planning thinks women today do not treat their health seriously. The “healthy spirit in a healthy body” motto of the Soviet times has lost its place.

Gayane Avagyan, senior specialist at the agency for organization of medical aid at the Ministry of Healthcare shares the opinion.

“The passivity of our women puzzles me. They don’t want to be examined even when the state provides them with free opportunity to be examined for cervical cancer on an outpatient basis,” says Avagyan.

The National program against cervical cancer in Armenia was launched in January 2006. Armenia is the second country among the former Soviet countries after Lithuania to realize the program.

Avagyan says Armenia is a leading country in this field, but the number of women who get regular checkups is still low. She believes some women feel afraid, others can’t afford to get to a clinic, and some prefer to learn as late as possible.

Khachanush Hakobyan, the executive director of the Armenian-American Health Center observes a different tendency. The number of daily visits to the Center of Mammography was only two in 1997. Today there are 70 visits daily; 15 percent of the visits are for preventive purposes. During its 10 years the center has provided some 120,000 examinations to 85,000 women. And there have been 600 cases when the early stages of cancer were caught and successfully treated.

Poghosyan says he sees three groups of women in the field of reproductive health care. The first group includes women who seem to inherit good health and address doctors only in critical situations. The second group is concerned with appearance rather than health.

“The third group includes women whose husbands work abroad and return with numerous infectious illnesses that cause reproductive failure,” he says.

One of the important indexes of reproductive health is the level of sterility in Armenia. The survey held by the Armenian Association for the Family and Health in 1998 showed the primary and the secondary sterility in Armenia make 3.4 and 28 percents respectively. (Primary is when a woman has problems with reproductive health and cannot conceive and bear her first child in life, secondary is when a woman has problems with reproduction after bearing one child.)

Avagyan says the figures are unofficial, but they are troubling, because they are double the rate of incidence in some other countries (in Russia, for instance, the figure makes 18 and 19 percent).

Georgi Poghosyan explains it is not a growth in the number of barrenness, but the structure of illnesses that matters.

“Young people should solve their health problems before marriage,” he says. “Before registering marriages the state should demand documents on health condition.”

Healthy children, he says, are born only by healthy women.

While women such as Mnatsakanyan suffer the anxiety of infertility, others damage their reproductive systems by having multiple abortions. While the number of abortions is in decline, as recently as the last five years, abortion was the leading means of birth control. According to the National Statistics Service, there are about 8-10,000 abortions per year here. (Official figures for abortions are not reliable, as abortions often are not registered in hospitals and are done secretly. Avagyan says that statistics show that the number of abortions has neither increased nor decreased. Whereas 8,000-10,000 abortions were registered in 2005, then in 2000 11,769, and in 2001 – 10,419. )

Women in Armenia face a relatively new concern that impacts their ability to bear children – environmental hazards.

Knarik Grigoryan, program assistant at the Armenian Women for Clear Environment NGO says some reproductive ailments are connected with chemical toxin exhaust in the environment.

According to Grigoryan toxins (consumed through air and water) collect and create problems during pregnancy. About 2-3 percent of miscarriages can be blamed on breathing polluted air, Grigoryan says. A survey by the NGO found the highest number of reproductive ailments in the Shengavit community of Yerevan where factories thrived during Soviet times.

“A child who has grown up in this district faces problems of reproduction 20 years later. The chemical toxins penetrate into the body through the respiratory system causing deformations, including the genitals,” explains Grigoryan.

As concerns linger over improving reproductive rate, Armenia’s birthrate has increased in recent years reaching 37-38,000 per year – an increase of about 3,000 per year in this decade.

Still, in order for Armenia to maintain “simple reproduction” the next generation of women will need to have at least two children each, says Avagyan, who is a proponent of artificial insemination.

Beginning 2005 the Research Center for Mother and Child Healthcare has realized nearly 300-400 impregnations by means of in-vitro fertilization (IVF), and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), which saw the first birth in Armenia this month. In total artificial fertilization has produced 150 childbirths.

The procedure is expensive and not an option for most women in Armenia – even more reason, the specialists say, for young women to pay attention to their health early.

“A child without a mother, a husband without a wife, a society without a guard of the family hearth loses everything. Women are simply obliged to undergo preventive examinations,” says Hakobyan.

While pregnancy is never without risks (worldwide 1,400 women die each day from pregnancy-related causes), specialists advise women to have at least four examinations during their term.