Maternal Death in West Timor: Phenomenally Challenging

We describe our research on mapping maternal mortality situated in West Timor, where we combined geographic and anthropological techniques to describe families’ lived experiences. We conducted a pilot study in 2011 and report here on the research design, research methods and some of the challenges faced during the study. ‘What counts and who decides’, the theme of this book, are highly relevant to maternal mortality in a developing context. On the issue of ‘what counts’, maternal mortality is not counted in many countries despite women (and infants) dying each year. On the issue of ‘who decides’, we discuss who decides on birth choices, who decides how the story of a maternal death is told and the challenge of convincing a human research ethics committee of the beneficence and the absence maleficence of our study. We will describe how we collected the data cross-culturally, and the ethical concerns that we encountered in collecting phenomenological data.