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Contributor Emma Clark
Emma Clark was the Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health Technical Director at Chemonics. She holds a master’s degree in global disease epidemiology and control from Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health and a master’s in nurse-midwifery from Frontier Nursing University. Earlier in her career, Emma worked in humanitarian response, developing and managing health and nutrition programs in some of the world’s most challenging environments, including Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, Jordan, Kenya, and South Sudan. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Botswana in 2006-07, following her graduation from Smith College, and a Duke-Johnson & Johnson Nurse Leadership Fellow in 2016-2017.
by Emma Clark
Tragic but Not Unique: Maternal Death in a Rural Clinic
At 1 a.m., Winnie, the midwife at a small health clinic in a rural town in Uganda, was startled awake when the security guard from the clinic pounded on her door—a woman had arrived in labor. When Winnie arrived at the facility, she was surprised to see Clara, a young woman expecting her first baby…
A Voice for Midwives is a Voice for Progress
Several years ago, a colleague was telling me about his efforts to introduce a new family planning method in one of the countries he worked in. “The women just weren’t interested in this method,” he said, frustrated. Initially, he and his team of experts couldn’t figure out why. They’d done a lot of legwork to…
Maternal Mortality Review Committees Ask “Why” to Prevent Maternal Deaths
Late one night about a year ago, I got the call no health care worker ever wants to receive. The man left a heart-stopping message with my midwifery practice’s answering service saying that our patient — his previously healthy wife — and their unborn child had just abruptly passed away at another Washington, D.C.-area hospital.…
Innovations for Maternal and Newborn Health: Getting from “Great Ideas” to “Global Lifesavers”
Think we’ve made progress in maternal and newborn health (MNH) in the past 30 years? You’re right: Maternal mortality has dropped from 550,000 deaths due to pregnancy-related causes a year to 303,000, and newborn mortality from 4.4 million to 2.7 million newborns each year. But if you think that still sounds like a lot of…
What World Breastfeeding Week Means for These Women
It’s World Breastfeeding Week (WBW), so I should probably start by saying: I’m a huge advocate of breastfeeding. It can be a lovely way for a mother and baby to bond, and it offers a wonderful source of nutrition to a growing infant. It appears to have many benefits to mothers and babies and a positive impact on…
My Mundane Professional Association Meeting is a Luxury Most Midwives Can Only Imagine
After work, once every couple of months, I have the luxury of making my way across town to the American College of Nurse-Midwives (ACNM) Washington, D.C. Affiliate meeting to spend a couple of hours eating lukewarm Peruvian chicken and discussing issues affecting midwives at the local and national level. It’s not the meetings themselves that…