The giver of light: Here's how Dr. Laura Stachel is fighting to ensure no mother gives birth in the dark ForbesOver50
n March of 2008, obstetrician-gynecologist Laura Stachel was standing in the maternity ward at Nigeria’s Kofan Gayan State Hospital and feeling utterly helpless.
During a visit to Nigeria in 2008, Dr. Stachel snapped this photo of a midwife using a kerosene lantern to illuminate her work at night.Stachel was in Nigeria as part of a medical anthropology program, something that was supposed to be her career’s second act. A degenerative disc disease had compressed the nerves in her arms and ended her career as a surgeon and on-call obstetrician, so Stachel was looking to add a master’s in public health to her MD.
“Other clinicians came to me from smaller clinics saying, ‘you helped the hospital but we're in the dark, too. Can you help us?’” she recalls. Though she knows there’s much work to be done to meet her goal of “lighting every birth”—the World Health Organization estimates that, globally, more than 300,000 women lose their lives in childbirth every year—the impact she’s been able to create well after turning 50 has changed her perspective on the back injury that ended her career as a busy obstetrician.
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