New pregnancy grant

Extending the child support grant to pregnant mothers could help reduce South Africa's "astonishingly high" maternal mortality rate.

This is according to research by Wits University health economist Professor Alex van den Heever, commissioned by the Department of Social Development.

Van den Heever will present his findings to the Treasury.

Chile, which has an economy of about the same size as South Africas, has 24 maternal deaths per 100 000 women. But in South Africa between 300 and 400 women per 100000 die from pregnancy-related causes, Van den Heever told doctors at the Wits Centre for Health Policy's summit on maternal deaths on Friday.

One of the biggest causes of this sky-high maternal mortality rate is that many women present themselves for antenatal care too late in their pregnancy.

Some arrive at hospital for the first time when they are already in labour. This often makes it impossible for doctors to deal with complications in time.

Van den Heever said women knew that they should go to a clinic for a check-up but often could not afford the bus or taxi fare.

"We need to protect pregnant women's access to employment and offer them generalised income support," he said.

Transport costs and the loss of pay for leaving work for a day discouraged women from seeking medical treatment.

Research at the Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital by Youth Lab sociologist Tessa Doorns found that pregnancies made poor women feel "helpless".

"Most pregnancies are unplanned," she told the summit.

Van den Heever said maternal deaths led to "long-term systematic problems in a country's development".

Malnourishment of the foetuses and infants led to irreversible damage to the child," he said.

"Poor brain development cannot be reversed through education or eating well later in life."

Doorns said the pregnant women she interviewed said they knew they should have a balanced diet but could not afford it.

The extension of the child support grant to pregnant women could be structured so that they were compelled to get antenatal care, said Van den Heever.

It was "absolute "nonsense" that child support grants increased the number of pregnancies.

"We have one of the biggest child grant systems in the world - and declining fertility," he said.

A Statistics SA estimate released last year stated that fertility in South Africa had declined from an average of 2.71 children per woman in 2002 to 2.34 in 2013.

Social assistance accounted for R118-billion in this year's Budget, of which child support amounted to R40-billion.

The child support grant will rise from R300 to R310 a month next month, and to R320 a month from October.