Dr. Mary Fariba Afsari

And yet we are still faced with the similar challenges today.

So that's an interesting part of this for me.

I mean, what was amazing is as I engaged with my grandmother's story, we had a patient present to one of the hospitals that I work at who was near death with sepsis.

And as we took her to surgery and went through all of the steps that were required to save her life, it slowly dawned on me that that had been my grandmother's story and that in a different time and a different place under different circumstances, she could have been saved.

And so when you lose a mother and you lose an entire family system, especially when you have young children, a baby died that she was carrying.

The one-year-old child ultimately ended up dying as well just from sheer inability to care for him.

And so my mother, her brother and sister at a very young age lost a sibling and their mother and a future sibling all within a year.

And I can't say that they are not still impacted by that today, more than 50 years later.

And that gets passed on now to me.

And so that moral conscience, that understanding how critical it is to be able to provide women with life-saving care in order to prevent this type of tragedy to an entire family system, I mean, that's what came to light to me and for me.

over the course of engaging with the ghost of my grandmother, essentially.

I went down to Bolivia for a one-month rotation as a third-year medical student.

I received a fellowship, and I flew down there for this great adventure.

And the pediatrics rotation was incredible.

We were in orphanages and in hospital settings and in outpatient clinics with indigenous folks, and we were in the main cities.

And yet—

That was a time in Bolivia back in the early to mid-2000s where contraception was still illegal.

So not just abortion, but also birth control.

And so we were encountering families.

So these moms would bring in their babies to have us do an exam on, and they would be number 10 or number 11 or number 12 for the baby.