U.S. has role in Africa's unplanned baby bonanza
SIRAKANO, Uganda — At age 45, after giving birth to 13 children in her
village of thatch roofs and bare feet, Beatrice Adongo made a discovery
that startled her: birth control.
"I delivered all these children because I didn't know there was another
way," said Adongo, who started on a free quarterly contraceptive
injection last year. Surrounded by her weary-faced brood, her
21-month-old boy clutching at her faded blue dress, she added glumly:
"I fear we are already too many in this family."
On a continent where fewer than one in five married women use modern
contraception, an explosion of unplanned pregnancies is threatening to
bury Adongo's family and a generation of Africans under a mountain of
poverty.
Promoting birth control in Africa faces a host of obstacles —
patriarchal customs, religious taboos, ill-equipped public health
systems — but experts also blame a powerful, more distant force: the
U.S. government.
Under President George W. Bush , the United States withdrew from its
decades-long role as a global leader in supporting family planning,
driven by a conservative ideology that favored abstinence and shied
away from providing contraceptive devices in developing countries, even
to married women.
Bush's mammoth global anti-AIDS initiative, the President's Emergency
Plan for AIDS Relief, poured billions of dollars into Africa but
prohibited groups from spending any of it on family planning services
or counseling programs, whose budgets flat-lined.
The restrictions flew in the face of research by international aid
agencies, the U.N. World Health Organization and the U.S. government's
own experts, all of whom touted contraception as a crucial method of
preventing births of babies being infected with HIV, the virus that
causes AIDS.
The Bush program is widely hailed as a success, having supplied
lifesaving anti-retroviral drugs to more than 2 million HIV patients
worldwide.
However, researchers, Africa experts and veteran U.S. health officials
now think that PEPFAR also contributed to Africa's epidemic population
growth by undermining efforts to help women in some of the world's
poorest countries exercise greater control over their fertility.
village of thatch roofs and bare feet, Beatrice Adongo made a discovery
that startled her: birth control.
"I delivered all these children because I didn't know there was another
way," said Adongo, who started on a free quarterly contraceptive
injection last year. Surrounded by her weary-faced brood, her
21-month-old boy clutching at her faded blue dress, she added glumly:
"I fear we are already too many in this family."
On a continent where fewer than one in five married women use modern
contraception, an explosion of unplanned pregnancies is threatening to
bury Adongo's family and a generation of Africans under a mountain of
poverty.
Promoting birth control in Africa faces a host of obstacles —
patriarchal customs, religious taboos, ill-equipped public health
systems — but experts also blame a powerful, more distant force: the
U.S. government.
Under President George W. Bush , the United States withdrew from its
decades-long role as a global leader in supporting family planning,
driven by a conservative ideology that favored abstinence and shied
away from providing contraceptive devices in developing countries, even
to married women.
Bush's mammoth global anti-AIDS initiative, the President's Emergency
Plan for AIDS Relief, poured billions of dollars into Africa but
prohibited groups from spending any of it on family planning services
or counseling programs, whose budgets flat-lined.
The restrictions flew in the face of research by international aid
agencies, the U.N. World Health Organization and the U.S. government's
own experts, all of whom touted contraception as a crucial method of
preventing births of babies being infected with HIV, the virus that
causes AIDS.
The Bush program is widely hailed as a success, having supplied
lifesaving anti-retroviral drugs to more than 2 million HIV patients
worldwide.
However, researchers, Africa experts and veteran U.S. health officials
now think that PEPFAR also contributed to Africa's epidemic population
growth by undermining efforts to help women in some of the world's
poorest countries exercise greater control over their fertility.
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