Sonja Liggett-Igelmund

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Sonja Liggett-Igelmund (* 1974 in Cologne ) is a German-British midwife and Queen of the village of Havé in Ghana , who was crowned in Africa and known for her commitment to expectant mothers and midwives in Germany and Ghana.

education and profession

She was born in 1974 in Cologne-Weyertal as the daughter of a German and an Englishman. After graduating from high school , she attended a midwifery school in Wuppertal and then worked as a midwife.

International engagement in obstetrics

Together with a television team from Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), she traveled to Ghana in 2011 as part of a two-week film project to the village of Havé near the Togolese border, where she worked in obstetrics with local people . The report about her stay was broadcast on November 16, 2011 as an episode of the report series “Job in the luggage” on Hier und heute (script: Marika Liebsch).

In May 2012 she opened her blog “Meeting Bismarck, als Midwife nach Ghana”, which she named after the first boy she gave birth there and who was named “Bismarck” in honor of her - the German midwife. She later founded a small non-governmental organization Meeting Bismarck with her husband Markus Igelmund and organized a container with donated equipment and relief supplies in the summer of 2012, and in October she traveled with her family to Havé to personally look after the distribution on site and the people using it to instruct the objects. Later she helped the village to get an ambulance donated from Germany. On her initiative, students from Düsseldorf later built a midwifery house together with students from the technical school on site.

However, she had to close her own station in Germany with 1,200 births a year.

At the WDR meeting in Cologne with Bettina Böttinger , Liggett-Igelmund reported on her engagement in Ghana on June 13, 2017. She also reported a deterioration in midwifery care at birth in Germany. The actress Hannelore Hoger summed up the result of the discussion with the following words: "We'll all hit the table now", which resulted in the hashtag # AufdenTischhauenfürHebammen.

At the meeting of the CDU Women's Union in August 2017, on the second day of which an application was to be made to secure midwifery care in Germany, she and others drew the Venus symbol and an exclamation mark on the floor with chalk many times. She also made Chancellor Angela Merkel personally aware of the grievances relating to obstetrics and the midwifery profession and symbolically handed her a package of chalk. As press spokeswoman for the Midwives Initiative for Germany e. V. , which is closely linked with the network of parents 'initiatives for childbirth culture and the Federal Parents' Initiative Mother Hood eV, it is politically committed to improving obstetrics. She also advises hospitals, together with other midwives, on how to organize obstetrics.

On behalf of the WDR, the filmmaker Marika Liebsch accompanied her for six years and made a documentary about her engagement.

In the summer of 2019, Liggett-Igelmund drew attention to the birth of three children with unilateral hand malformations in a clinic in Gelsenkirchen after hearing about the children. As a result, numerous parents of children with similar malformations got in touch. The Ministry of Health of North Rhine-Westphalia announced investigations and the hospital in question contacted the Berlin Charité . According to the media, there is currently no central official reporting point to record this type of malformation. At the federal state level there are in some cases such bodies, for example the malformation monitoring system in Saxony-Anhalt, established in 1980, with which congenital malformations and anomalies are recorded. Similar cases have occurred in France in recent years, including 18 in the Ain department alone between 2000 and 2014. On September 30, 2019, the NRW Ministry of Health announced that for the years 2017, 2018, 2019 as of 27. September 2019 a total of 72, 64 and 61 malformations of the upper extremities were reported in North Rhine-Westphalia and malformations of the hands were found in significantly less than 0.1 percent of all newborns. In the ministry's view, there are “no obvious trends and regional clusters” in this regard. A more comprehensive analysis and a data comparison from other survey systems are still being worked on.

Further media appearances

In 2018 she appeared as a midwife in the television series Lindenstrasse . She was later reported on in the documentary series “ People Up Close ”.

Award

  • She chose the village of Havé as her queen. Liggett-Igelmund compares her role to that of a mayor. There are "many chiefs and queen mothers", each with their own responsibility. She is responsible for the development of the village.

Web links

Press

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b "Angela Merkel wanted my business card". How a woman from Sülz is committed to what is perhaps the most important profession in the world. In: www.menscheninkoeln.de. Retrieved September 14, 2019 .
  2. ^ Meeting Bismarck e. V. In: www.planet-wissen.de. April 2, 2015, accessed September 14, 2019 .
  3. ^ Meeting Bismarck. In: www.meeting-bismarck.de. Retrieved September 14, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Imprint. In: www.meeting-bismarck.de. Retrieved September 15, 2019 .
  5. ↑ a b From development aid in Africa to activist in Germany: Sonja Liggett-Igelmund. In: www.domradio.de/. November 25, 2018, accessed September 14, 2019 .
  6. ^ Reunion with Bismarck Jonas Oku. In: www.volksfreund.de. January 7, 2013, accessed September 14, 2019 .
  7. ↑ Midwife Sonja fights for dignified births (from min. 14:25). In: WDR documentary. Retrieved September 14, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Midwife Sonja fights for dignified births (from min. 27:32). In: WDR documentary. Retrieved September 14, 2019 .
  9. ↑ Midwife Sonja fights for dignified births (from min. 28:50). In: WDR documentary. Retrieved September 14, 2019 .
  10. ↑ Midwife Sonja fights for dignified births. In: WDR documentary. A film for people up close by Marika Liebsch. Retrieved September 15, 2019 .
  11. ↑ cooperation. In: www.hebammenfuerdeutschland.d. Retrieved September 15, 2019 .
  12. ↑ midwife Sonja Liggett Igelmund directed urgent appeal to Jens Spahn. In: www.hebammenfuerdeutschland.de. August 3, 2019, accessed September 15, 2019 .
  13. ↑ We hear nothing "Midwife Sonja fights for her job - and directs an urgent appeal to Jens Spahn. In: Series" Our true heroes ". Www.focus.de. February 28, 2019, accessed on September 15, 2019 .
  14. ^ Reunion with Bismarck Jonas Oku. In: www.volksfreund.de. January 7, 2013, accessed September 14, 2019 .
  15. ↑ Midwife Sonja fights for dignified births (from min. 41:32). In: WDR documentary. Retrieved September 14, 2019 .
  16. ↑ A midwife changes the circumstances. In: press lounge. WDR, June 16, 2017, accessed on September 14, 2019 .
  17. ↑ Cologne midwife made malformations of babies public. In: WDR news. September 13, 2019, accessed September 14, 2019 .
  18. ↑ Malformations in babies: doctor calls for central reporting office. In: www.rtl.de. September 16, 2019, accessed September 17, 2019 .
  19. ↑ Babies with malformations - Ministry wants to query all clinics. In: world. September 14, 2019, accessed September 14, 2019 .
  20. ↑ a b In NRW. Babies are born with malformed hands: More cases surfaced. In: www.focus.de. September 14, 2019, accessed September 15, 2019 .
  21. ↑ Philipp J. Meckert: "Nobody could tell us why". Parents of babies without hands describe their experiences. In: www.focus.de. September 14, 2019, accessed September 15, 2019 .
  22. ↑ Babies without hands The malformation scandal in France. In: image. September 13, 2019, accessed September 15, 2019 .
  23. ↑ Babies born without hands: Ministry gives the all-clear. In: www.focus.de. September 30, 2019, accessed October 4, 2019 .
  24. ↑ Bernd Peters: How she got the role The “Lindenstrasse” midwife is real. In: www.express.de. June 10, 2018, accessed September 17, 2019 .
  25. ↑ Live after nine. In: programm.ard.de. August 22, 2018. Retrieved September 17, 2019 .
  26. ^ Rebecca Baden, Eva L. Hoppe: Visiting West African kings and queens - in Germany. Sonja Liggett-Igelmund, 44: Queen in the village of Have in Ghana. In: www.vice.com. November 2, 2018, accessed September 14, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Liggett-Igelmund, Sonja
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-British midwife, Queen of the village of Havé
DATE OF BIRTH 1974
PLACE OF BIRTH Cologne