The First Lady, Mrs. Theresa Kufuor has pledged her commitment to do all in her power to reduce Ghana's annual startling maternal mortality rate of 740 deaths per 100,000 live births.

As a first step, she has called for a review of the 18 years marriage age for girls passed during the second Parliament to 21 as boys', due to expressed concerns about complications mothers below 21 years of age experience during pregnancies and childbirth. Mrs Kufuor, herself a trained midwife, disclosed that it beats her mind why the marriage age for girls has been pegged at 18 years while boys have 21, judging that they both marry each other.

She told Ghanaian journalists at her hotel in Mali, last Tuesday. The First Lady who was attending a two-day forum on Maternal and Neonatal Mortality in West and Central Africa at the invitation of the Malian First Lady, Madam Adame Ba Konare, endorsed a uniform marriage age for both sexes in Ghana.

"If boys are allowed to marry at 21 years, why should girls be made to marry at 18 years." the First Lady wondered. At the forum, startling statistics on maternal and neonatal mortality were presented using illustrations that indicated that the West and Central Africa have the highest figures, where most of the deaths involve young mothers, with retrogressive traditional practices like female genital mutilation playing a part.

Young mothers aside being at great health risks during pregnancies and childbirths are also denied education, a home, family, a place in society, access to resources and livelihood, and even legal existence. Mrs Kufuor confessed that though the problems of maternal and neonatal mortality are age long and fairly known, the statistics presented at the forum "shocked me into action, especially to have such figures in the 21st century ", promising her preparedness to support any individual or organisation in Ghana committed to the reduction in such deaths, which to her are preventable.

She also pledged to advocate for the provision of health infrastructure, including obstetric services in communities, manned by trained midwives, to do away with delays in seeking emergency care. The provision of such facilities, she pointed out, will ensure that women attend antenatal clinics and have supervise delivery, as well as receive obstetric emergency care when in need, thereby eliminating the problems of transportation and quality of services provided.

Putting weight on her preparedness to reduce the nation's maternal mortality rate, she pointed out that she wouldn't mind assisting in delivery, though she left the practice about ten years ago, "Once a midwife, always a midwife" was her response. The First Lady, also yearning to offer young school drop out mothers a beacon of hope, said she will co-ordinate with others already in the pre-school business to establish pre-school complexes in communities across the country that would offer such mothers counselling services to better take care of themselves and their children and also to offer them the opportunity to learn a trade to empower them economically.

Asked her response to the affirmative action calling for quotas for women, Mrs Kufuor opined that it would be suicidal for women to leave their fate in the hands of men to push them, because history has shown that if women depend on men, they will be stacked at the same place for centuries to come. To her, it is the responsibility of educated women to carry other unfortunate women along with them and not expect anything on a silver platter.

The conference, organised by Population Reference Bureau (PRB), a Washington-based research organisation and UNICEF sought to enlist political commitment and support for the implementation of a regional operational strategies for maternal and neonatal mortality and also to advocate for policies that promote, including resource allocation for improved maternal and new born health care, among others.