A Pain Without Relief: Why Ghana’s Mothers Deserve a Maternity Clinic Built for Dignity
An appeal from the Life Can Ghana Initiative (LCGI) to our partners and friends
There is a moment, repeated tens of thousands of times each year in the maternity wards of Ghana, that rarely makes the news: a woman in active labor, alone on a narrow bed or sometimes on the floor of a crowded ward, with no cubicle, no curtain, and no gas mask to breathe through. She is not without care — a midwife is nearby, doing everything her training and her overstretched shift allow. But she is, in the fullest sense, without relief. The contractions come, and there is nothing between her and the pain but her own breath and the encouragement of a nurse who may be tending two or three other laboring women at the same time.
This is not a failure of compassion. It is a failure of infrastructure — and it is one that we, at the Life Can Ghana Initiative, believe can be changed.
The Gap Between What Exists and What Is Offered
In much of the world’s high-income health systems, women in labor are offered a simple, self-administered gas: a blend of nitrous oxide — commonly called laughing gas — and oxygen, breathed through a mask or mouthpiece. It is not a cure-all. But it is remarkable for what it is not — it is not invasive, it does not require a needle in the spine, it clears from the body in a few breaths, and the mother herself controls when to use it and when to stop. In countries like Sweden, Canada, and the United Kingdom, some form of this gas is often the first thing offered to a woman in pain, precisely because its risks are so mild by comparison with the alternatives.
In Ghana, this option is, for practical purposes, absent — not rejected after consideration, but simply missing from the conversation. Research examining the labor wards of major Ghanaian hospitals, including facilities that serve as national referral centers, found that midwives and nurses could name only two pharmacological options for pain: an opioid injection called pethidine, and epidural analgesia — the latter spoken of more as an aspiration than a routine offering, since it demands anesthesia specialists and equipment that most facilities do not have on hand.
When the Only Options Come With a Price
Here is the uncomfortable truth we want our sponsors to sit with: every pain-relief method available to a laboring woman in Ghana today carries a cost that gas-and-oxygen analgesia largely avoids.
Pethidine, the more commonly used option, can bring nausea, vomiting, and drowsiness to the mother — and it crosses the placenta, meaning it can affect the baby’s heart rate and, if timed poorly, contribute to respiratory depression in the newborn. Ghanaian midwives themselves have voiced concern about this trade-off, describing their own hesitation to administer a drug they know may compromise the very infant they are trying to safely deliver.
Epidural analgesia, though the most effective at eliminating pain outright, is also the most invasive: it carries risks of headache, a drop in blood pressure, urinary retention, occasional nerve injury, and can lengthen the second stage of labor or increase the likelihood of instrumental delivery. And in a health system where anesthesia specialists are scarce and unevenly distributed, it is simply not an option most women will ever be offered, regardless of its risks or benefits.
So the honest picture is this: a Ghanaian woman in labor today faces a narrow, difficult choice — endure the pain with no pharmacological support at all, relying on a midwife’s massage or encouragement to breathe; or accept a drug whose side effects reach not only her but her unborn child. The gentler middle path, walked every day by mothers in wealthier nations, does not yet exist for her.
A Technician’s Answer to a Technical Gap
This is where our own team’s expertise comes directly into play. Chaim Jeshurun, co-leader of LCGI, has spent his career as a skilled service technician specializing in medical equipment used in obstetric care — including the very breathing machines that deliver nitrous oxide and oxygen analgesia to laboring women. He has seen firsthand, in the systems he services and maintains, how adjustable these machines can be: rather than the fixed, single-ratio blend familiar in some Western hospitals, the equipment he works with can be tuned across a range of oxygen concentrations — from thirty percent upward — allowing clinicians to titrate the mixture to what is safest and most effective for each mother, rather than offering a one-size-fits-all gas.
Chaim’s goal, and LCGI’s goal alongside him, is to introduce this kind of breathing equipment into Ghana for the first time in a systematic way — not as an experiment, but as standard equipment in a properly built maternity clinic. That means not just the machines themselves, but the piping or cylinder delivery systems, the safe ventilation and scavenging design that protects the health of midwives working in the room day after day, and the training that ensures every mother who wants this option can be shown, simply and gently, how to use it.
What We Are Building, and Why It Matters
The Life Can Ghana Initiative wants to be working to establish a maternity clinic that closes this gap — one equipped not only with the basics of safe delivery, but with the analgesic infrastructure that dignity requires: safely installed, adjustable gas-and-oxygen breathing machines, properly ventilated rooms, and midwives trained to offer women a real choice in how they meet their pain.
This is not a luxury project. It is, in the plainest terms, about making sure that when a mother in Kasoa in Ghana or a neighboring community or where ever else in Ghana, goes into labor, she is not left to choose between silence and side effects. It is about restoring to her the same simple mercy — a mask, a breath, a moment of relief — that is taken for granted in so much of the world.
We are a small organization, registered in both Sweden and Ghana. We know what the equipment costs. We know what it takes to install it safely, because it is Chaim’s daily trade. What we need now are partners willing to stand with us as we build it.
If this account has moved you — as it moves us every time we speak with the midwives and mothers who live it — we invite you to join us. A gift toward this clinic is not an abstraction. It is, quite literally, the difference between a woman screaming through her labor alone and a woman breathing steadily through it, supported, safe, and heard.