Universal?? It's a brave person indeed who can boldly state that something is "universal in third world countries", even in hugely patriarchal cultures such as the Chinese and most of those of the Indian sub-continent. But one of the 'universals' is the special treatment, at least 'traditionally', for the post-delivery period -- special foods, food taboos, restrictions on behaviour and movement, etc.
Further --
>Meanwhile the women die of anemia, starvation, disease, complications
in pregnancy >and childbirth, postpartum hemorrage, and if you try to
empower women to overcome >these horrid conditions (and these
conditions existed here a mere 100 years ago), you >are interfering
with their religion and culture. So, public health measures have to
figure >out how to deal with the religious and cultural ideology to
educate people and have >strategies to effect positive change for
women. It's very, very difficult, and I can just >image what they
think of first world westerners coming in trying to "help" them
>(colonialism in reverse?).
What to attribute to culture and religion and what to poverty, the failure of government in provisioning of services, etc. might be gauged from the extent to which so many people in so many third world countries quickly shift to having their babies in a health facility when available, with corresponding rapid decreases in maternal morbidity. And in many third world countries, this has come about within the very short period of the past fifty years or less.
If anything, against the observable choices of people, it's -- for lack of a better term -- 'activists' who lament the 'marginalisation' or decline or native systems and practices with the arrival of modern health facilities.
More difficult is the abandonment of the special treatment, some of which probably made sense in pre-modern conditions, e.g., bathing at a time when that meant going to an out-house or down to the river, and some of which may have mixed the sensible with the nonsensical, e.g., special protein- and fat-rich foods in the case of the Chinese, combined with a taboo on all sorts of greens and roughage (as 'cooling' foods, hence 'bad' for mother and for milk production, since she was, in my crude understanding, suppose to recover the 'heat' lost in the process of childbirth).
And --
> Sleeping with baby is inevitable.
is -- was? -- perhaps an almost universal practice in many third world societies, combined with extended periods of breast-feeding, sometimes for up to 4 years or more.
kj khoo