On my recent visit to Kisumu a woman walked into Kmet Medical Clinic in Kisumu with a six month old in hand.
Soon as she stepped inside a little toddler probably clocking 2 years follows grabbing on his shorts to keep them in place.
And another follows with a potbell leading the way, pulling back mucas that has gathered on his mouth.
And yet a much older follows and another and another till all the nine have disappeared inside the clinic.
“Those are her nine children, I think she has come for a contraceptive method. But she looks pregnant” the health worker observes.
Why she comes with all the children you ask?
On top of the fact that the clinic provides nutrition supplements to malnourished children, this way they attract their mothers that while they bring their children for the healthy porriadge, they are taught how to plan their families.
Now the women in turn use the excuse for taking children for immunisation and nutrition to get onto any contraceptive method their husbands dont approve. In fact it calls for a beating if he finds out. So the Injectaplan is prefered because its private he wont suspect a thing.
And here she is with all nine children that way her husband would not suspect that she is trying to stop having children. He wants all of them out. He doesnt have a job by the way but I hear its an ego thing.
The men who shelter the idea or agree to lessons on family planning and escort their wives for a method or to the hospital to deliver ask that they be given tea, soda, food, entertainment, transport even an allowance.
WHY you ask again? You are taking up their valuable time they would otherwise be using at the newspaper vendor to discuss Migingo or play cards.
So woman here has come for the Injection.
“Mama you are three months pregnant” the health worker tells her. Her face is in shock she doesnt understand how that could be because she is breastfeeding. Hell no there is no way in hell she is going to add a tenth to the burden she has now.
“Give me the injection anyway” she says in Luo.
When the health worker explains that its impossible she asks that an abortion be done.
Silence.
The health worker doesnt know what explanation to give this time.
Neither do I know what you tell such a woman.
Do you know?
sockies just…
real sad situation she is in!
Can she afford the fees to have her fallopian tubes cut?……no guess not, B2B said it, real sad situation indeed. are u really back?
conundrum. huge!
hello my darling.
Kazoz those are cut free of charge or is it if you buy a voucher for say Shs 3000. Even for men. The funders pay for whatever method you want
Dunno…
stop being crazy bitch! you don give birth to 9 kids how do you now turn around and say you cant have one more?!
How many have you pushed through your vagina Spartakus to know what women go through and to want to stop at nine, two, one whatever? Have you ever had to wake up and find food for nine children plus the husband who is playing Zala?
That is tight bambi i feel sorry for such people
damn…this is indeed an excruciating conundrum, aka Akalibobo!
Bambi.
People should try crossing their legs…
Where’s Rev? Nga he had a lot to say about this the other day.
@Baz: Here I am. I’ve been following it from behind the scenes.
Yeah, so it is a conundrum when we have to figure out who pays for my mistake.
Of course it is a conundrum. I don’t want to be responsible for siring a child I cannot provide for. I don’t want to be responsible for having fucked and got (someone) pregnant.
There is no question about whether I should be responsible. The answer is known: I shouldn’t be. Someone else has to pay for what I did.
Right, people?
Let’s call abortion what it is: I’m killing this person, because it is (a) inconvenient for me for this person to stay alive, and (b) I have the power to do it.
I’m not against murder. But I’m against rationalising it as some sort of moral dilemma. It’s not. We kill the kids when we abort them, and it’s okay.
Or, is it?
heh heh.
What about contraception? What about giving women access to contraception and family planning info so that they don’t be having nine children? How about that?
Yes, they should all go with contraception as a default. We should sneak it into their drinks, even.
We should avoid getting to the situation where we have to kill the babies. Contraception is a godsend if only because it enables us not to kill.
that is unfortunate but you say no it is possible but not right. that would be murder.
That’s what everyone was telling you Rev. Family planning and population secretariat programmes are about arming women with information about their contraception options and about empowering them with the right to chose how many children to have and when to have them. The population problem is not in Kololo where rich women can and do produce large families of healthy kids who will become educated and productive citizens of the country: the problem is that women like that woman in Kisumu just cannot practice their desire to control their own productivity.
Incidentally, I was living in Kisumu town itself during Moi’s family planning drives. Never once did I hear anyone mention abortion. I have never known abortion to be a family planning strategy.
Family planning is not about forced abortions and it is a good and necessary thing and no patriotic African should oppose it.
@Baz, I’ve known that for rather long. What, again, is the gist?
Also, family planning is not only for women.
Also, I don’t know of anybody, personally, who is against family planning. I am personally against abortion.
And I’m against the limiting of our numbers, just because we don’t see now how we would deal with them later.
Uganda’s population growth, for your information, is not a case of one-woman-many-kids, or it wouldn’t be the fastest-growing per year. It’s a case of many people having few kids. And no patriotic African, as you say, should oppose that. Nobody should oppose anybody’s right to have children, especially those we can care for. Nobody should oppose reproductive freedom.
(But I know you oppose it, so maybe one can be patriotic and still oppose it. I just don’t see how, though.)
Rev so which side are you on? The fertility rate of Ugandan woman is 7 children per woman. This is few children per woman???? Yes? No? Every woman, who is sexually active should be empowered with the knowledge to prevent unwanted pregnancies and have children they can afford. I dont care whether its your teenage daughter or son as long as s/he is sexually active teach him/her about the condom, that way s/he MAY NOT end up at the abortion clinic.
And at the end of the day in this Uganda isnt the burden of looking after the many passed on to the older siblings? How many of you are not paying school fees for a sibling, cousin etc?
Why put your own children through the same. When they are supposed to have their own they are busy looking after others because munange nanti you wanted many because there was this whole “just because we don’t see now how we would deal with them later.”
Chanel, I\’m on the side of people knowing about and using contraceptives.
I\’m also on the side of the decision being left to them.
It\’s not true that whoever has many kids cannot provide for them. More importantly, \”many kids\” may mean \”one kid\” for many Ugandans. So, saying that people shouldn\’t have \”many kids\” is to deny some people having any kids.
The sad part is that this is born, at the moment, of pessimism. We assume that any greater-than-two number of kids is automatically going to be a problem for the future. In reality, we need many hands on board, and one way to get them is to have kids. (Another way is immigration, which the small-family nations are now banking on to keep their factories working – where are the immigrants coming from, if not in places where we had kids?) These people I was screaming against in the posts Baz alludes to are the ones saying that people (Ugandans in particular) are free – and should be free – to decide to have one billion kids per woman. It\’s not an accident that they are very fertile. The post is here. I did a follow-up, which is also here. Anybody calling the World at large (or Uganda in particular) over-populated is just being a pessimist without reason.
I think part of the problem is that it is suddenly trendy and looks the cool kind of iconoclastic to have few kids, especially in Uganda. \”One kid, like White people!\”
The fertility rate of the Ugandan woman is not seven kids per woman. That\’s not exactly a tenable rate, you know.
That statistic was arrived at by assuming that all the Ugandans born since 1991 were born to the child-bearing-age women of 2009 (with valid dates inserted, of course). This, of course, is not near true. (\”Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics\”.) Uganda has had big adult mortalities since current children were brought into the population count, and also huge refugee influxes from Rwanda (the genocide of \’94) and the Congo (the whole of the last twenty years, we\’ve had the whole of Congo-Orientale as a de facto part of Uganda).
Back to the point, yes, people should use contraceptives. It is as much their freedom to have a billion kids each as it is their freedom to have no kids at all.
I\’ve said up there that I think the contraceptives are good because they prevent the need to abort.
Now, if it comes to abortion, I reiterate my standing that there is no moral dilemma for as long as there is no moral dilemma about murder. If you are like me, and you agree that murder isn\’t bad, then you agree that abortion is not bad. Let\’s live with this, our acceptance of how okay it is to murder, and by extension our acceptance of abortion.
They try to make abortion somehow different from other forms of taking the life of a human being, which it isn\’t. They are the same. I don\’t like any pretences that abortions are somehow more-permissible. It\’s all murder.
(People, at this point, pull out that line about babies who have not yet formed. I have no qualms with stabbing babies, of course, and I don\’t care how old they are. But I understand when they feel that aborting a baby who has not yet formed is not the same as aborting in advanced stages. I agree, but I don\’t know where we put the line between \”baby formed\” and \”just a rather juicy zygote\”. Sources of people\’s moral guidance, like the Bible, for example, put the limit at \”when the baby is formed\” – which, until recently, could only be absolutely confirmed after the baby\’s death – but I don\’t know where to draw the line, so I don\’t have a debate on that. I think I agree that there is a line, though.)
Chanel, thanks for hosting this debate.
I\’m almost my evil self again!
WordPress has \”magic_quotes\” turned on? How shockingly lame of them!
27th shd start posting again…
what i have failed to understand is what goes on in the heads of men who think that their wives should have many children and not use family planning!someone decipher!