By Carolyn Miles
Around the world, an
estimated 222 million women who don’t want to get pregnant cannot access contraception.
I was surpised to learn Namutebi was one of them.
On
the way to the Ugandan hospital where I met Namutebi, I saw several clinics
advertising family planning services. The services were free and there for the
asking. But despite her deep desire to control her family size, Namutebi
told me she didn’t go to the clinics. Her husband didn’t want her to use
contraceptives, she said. It just wasn’t a decision she could make.
Namutebi
was in her early 20s, but she had just given birth to her fifth child.
She was lucky, really, because she escaped serious complications for her baby
or herself—even though she was unable to plan and space her pregnancies at
least two years apart as medically recommended. In fact, empowering women to
delay conception for three years after giving birth could save up to 1.8 million
children’s lives each year, as explained in Save the Children’s new report, Every Woman’s Right: How family
planning saves children’s lives.
But
Namutebi hardly felt like celebrating. She told me she felt
worried. How would she and her husband provide for their growing
family? Would there be enough money for food? For school
fees? And what if she kept having babies? She probably would, she
knew. The average Ugandan woman has seven children, a figure that has
barely budged for several decades.
In
Namutebi’s community and others around the world, large family size is equated
with status and even a perception of wealth. In some Ugandan tribes, for
example, a man may receive cows for every daughter he marries off. He’ll
need these when it comes time for his sons to marry. The whole thing can
end in a wash, but the pressures remain. Women like Namutebi and their
children often pay the price, sometimes with their lives.
In
many places where men have the upper hand, husbands may insist their wives keep
having children and become angry or even abusive if women choose to use
contraception. It makes sense, then, that when we talk about making family
planning more accessible for women, we include men in the conversation. The
Ugandan government has started to do that now with a campaign aimed at engaging
men around the benefits of having smaller families.
Save the Children also
includes men in our global efforts by helping train male “motivators” to talk
to their peers with messages on the importance of healthy timing and spacing of
births. At the same time, we must ensure that women themselves can access
family planning methods that are acceptable to them. That’s one of the
many reasons Save the Children puts great emphasis on training frontline health
workers to reach out directly to mothers in their own communities. These
health workers are a critical link to lifesaving maternal, newborn and child
health services—including family planning—for women who cannot access hospitals
or sometimes even a clinic.
This
week, world leaders congregated in London for a family planning summit hosted
by the British government and the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation. The summit addressed the barriers to improved
access and use of contraception, and prompted government pledges to for family
planning—which we hope will boost supplies, improve delivery and focus on the
critical role of frontline health workers. This comes on the heels of a
global “Child Survival Call to Action” hosted by the U.S., Indian and Ethiopian
governments in Washington last month. Save the Children is calling on policymakers
to endorse that forum’s goal of ending preventable child deaths within a
generation.
The
United States has helped lead the way to cutting child deaths by nearly half in
the last 20 years. We need to keep investing in girls’ education and
health and nutrition programs that we know save children’s lives. Family
planning is a key part of the solution.
Source: Logging Miles
