|
|
 |
|
News/Event Item
Call to Action
33rd Annual International Conference on Global Health
Separating Politics and Program: Envisioning a Healthier Dialogue on Reproductive Health
Dr. Nils Daulaire
President and CEO
Global Health Council
June 2, 2006
What lies at the center of better health for families and communities living in poverty? What is the moral, the right and the practical thing to do? I didn't know when I first went overseas, to Bangladesh, 30 years ago as a medical student. But early in my time there, I took care of a young woman of 19 bearing her third child in three and a half years, and watched her die in my hands as I was trying to deliver her baby. Her uterus had ruptured. And I asked her sister why she didn't use family planning. Her sister said, "She never had a choice." I saw the same thing in Africa when I worked there a few years later. In one family – a nuclear family where the husband had three wives and six children – the youngest of the wives spoke to my wife at one point and said, basically, "Can't I get a break?" This was the 1970s and in West Africa there was really no access, no availability of family planning.
Many people in those days said that women didn’t want family planning and couldn’t figure out how to use it, but global health leaders like Allan Rosenfield disproved that with their groundbreaking work in Thailand. Reproductive health issues are basic human realities faced by women throughout the developing world, and faced by men who love them, are married to them and are equally responsible for what goes on in their lives. There is no question that people throughout the world would like to manage their own fertility. People then, and now, want to decide for themselves the spacing and timing and the growth of their families.
This is a universal value. It is not a partisan value. I will remind you that the United States' support for international family planning began under a Republican administration: Richard Nixon, not known as a liberal. This was simply good, solid, practical science. It continued for decades. And it had enormous impact. We've seen it throughout the world. We've seen it in Bangladesh, where healthy women are raising healthy children and creating healthy families and strong communities. Bangladesh, when I was there in the '70s, had an average family size of seven. A very aggressive, multi-faceted, public, private, governmental, mixed program of family planning was in place at that point and got even bigger in the 1980s. And by the 1990s, the average family size in Bangladesh, in spite of its continued poverty and underdevelopment, had fallen to three and a half. People are better off, even if they're not vastly richer.
read speech
category: Global Health Council News : Announcements
contributed by Andrea Welch on 8 June 2006
Global :
recall this item.
|
|
Share
