By Njoki Karuoya
World Population Day is being celebrated today under the theme ‘Universal access to reproductive health services’, I suppose because not every man and woman in need of these services is getting it.
For a while now, attention has been placed on reproductive health concerns including family planning. These topics have a tendency to raise praise and ire in equal measure, perhaps because we still shy away from discussing, in open, all matters to do with sex, private parts and what they do, like producing forth children.
Yet these ‘sensitive’ matters have to be discussed repeatedly for them to get to the point of no longer being sensitive, so that all those issues that negatively affect the status of reproductive health can be sorted out.
women’s business
For instance, why are women still dying from childbirth? Is it because this issue is considered inconsequential? Maneno ya akina mama? (women’s business?).
Time is long overdue for men to get more actively involved in this child-bearing business in relation to ensuring that their women and children get first-class treatment, whether it is through the hands of traditional birth attendants or health centres.
Days of blaming God for taking away the lives of hundreds of women and children should permanently remain in the past as a lot of those ‘God’ deaths are largely a result of human negligence and ignorance.
If we as communities and as a country continue to relegate reproductive health to the back burners, then we shall continue to churn out children that are so unhealthy (which leads to lack of motivation with life) that we will forever remain a developing country, recording high rates of maternal and infant deaths.
Millennium Goals Four and Five deal with improving the lives of women and children by reducing their deaths at childbirth, and Kenya, to date, still shows little concern with its poor record in this regard.
Sadly, we are not even mourning the fact that, while other developing countries are making great strides in achieving their 2015 goal, we prefer to be lumped together with war-torn countries like Somalia and Afghanistan whose death rates are astronomical.
According to the United Nations Population Fund:
• Reproductive health problems remain the leading cause of ill health and death for women of childbearing age worldwide. Nearly 800 women die every day in the process of giving life.
contraceptives
Contraceptives prevent unintended pregnancies, reduce the number of abortions, and lower the incidence of death and disability related to complications of pregnancy and childbirth.
• Use of modern contraceptives in the developing world will prevent 218 million unintended pregnancies, which, in turn, will avert 55 million unplanned births, 138 million abortions (40 million of them unsafe), 25 million miscarriages and 118,000 maternal deaths.
• Increased education for women leads to better child health, greater family savings and stronger national economies.
• Greater efforts are needed to integrate family planning services into other health services, ensure continuous supplies of a broad range of methods, build service provision capacity, and improve provider competency in counselling, education and method provision (including helping women switch methods upon request).
• Governments of developing countries must prioritise the provision of high-quality contraceptive services in budget allocations and health policies, and donors need to increase their investment in the provision of contraceptive services in the developing world.
• New contraceptive methods are needed to ensure that women and men have access to methods that fit their life circumstances and preferences.
interventions needed
• Interventions are needed to address social factors that inhibit the use of modern contraceptives, such as women’s low level of decision-making power within families.
• Allowing women to plan their pregnancies also leads to healthier outcomes for children. A recent study showed that if all births were spaced at least two years apart, the number of deaths among children younger than five would decline by 13 per cent. The number would decline by 25 per cent if there were a three-year gap between births.
