There's no 'goodwill' from Robert Mugabe, a man with blood on his hands

According to the World Health Organisation, around 830 women die every day from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. It’s one of those figures which, no matter how you slice it – 35 per hour, 300,000 per year – never gets any less shocking. It’s also one that isn’t likely to improve any time soon.

Around half of these deaths occur in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Zimbabwe maternal mortality actually increased from 555 to 960 per 100,000 live births between 2006 and 2011, with 47 per cent of these deaths being classed as avoidable. Childbirth – a natural, necessary event, occurring daily since the dawn of humanity – is killing women, even when we have the knowledge and means to stop it.

It’s a bad time to be a woman of childbearing age. We have the technology to create artificial wombs and lifelike sexbots, but when it comes to the flesh-and-blood bodies of actual human females, resources are scarce.

The Trump administration has reversed and expanded the Global Gag Rule, meaning that any healthcare provider who so much as mentions abortion will be denied US funding.

And now the World Health Organisation has decided to declare Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s President, their latest "goodwill ambassador".

It’s a bizarre move from an organisation committed to improving life chances across the globe. Ignoring what the Non-Communicable Diseases Alliance describes as Mugabe’s “long track record of human rights violations”, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has described Zimbabwe as “a country that places universal health coverage and health promotion at the centre of its policies to provide health care to all”.

Yet it’s a country where life expectancy is lower than it was in the 1980s. When Mugabe himself needs treatment, he travels elsewhere.

And then there’s his view of women. Speaking at a 2015 African Union summit on women’s empowerment, Mugabe said he believed it “not possible for women to be on a par with men” because of their tendency to get pregnant. In one of patriarchy’s classic reversals, a woman’s ability to do something a man can’t do makes her less, rather than more, valuable. Not only that, but she’s not supposed to have any choice in the matter (“you see,” explained Mugabe, “we men, we want children. We make the very women we want in power, pregnant”).

In addition to rising maternal mortality rates, Zimbabwe sees an estimated 70,000 illegal, unsafe abortions per year. It’s utterly tragic that something as basic as taking control over one’s own reproductive destiny has come to mean risking one’s life. Anyone who has the power to change this yet stands by and does nothing cannot claim to care about providing health care to all.

A WHO goodwill ambassador does not have to have any particular healthcare expertise. He or she must only be a “well-known personality from the worlds of arts, literature, entertainment, sport or other fields of public life”. Even so, you’d think one thing they did require would be a modicum of goodwill. Yes, Mugabe’s appointment may be purely symbolic, but symbolically speaking, it’s an enormous slap in the face.

And it comes at a time when women in particular can’t afford to watch men play politics with their lives and health. Global femicide and plain old neglect mean males now outnumber females by 66 million, the highest figure ever recorded. Patriarchy doesn’t just kill women with knives and fists; it does so by deciding our bodies are mere resources to be exploited, undeserving of basic care and respect.

The WHO should have considered this before naming Mugabe their goodwill ambassador. Whether it’s Trump or Mugabe, every time a man who thinks women’s lives don’t matter is granted a position of authority, the social acceptability of misogyny is reinforced.

Healthcare is political in more ways than one. It’s high time we saw deaths in childbirth or due to unsafe abortion in the same way we see deaths as a result of male violence. There’s no goodwill from those who have blood on their hands.