A population of 1.25 billion and rising. India’s burgeoning population certainly explains why it was chosen as a host country for a global Family Planning gathering, FP2020. Delegates from different governments, civil society, multilateral organisations, donors, research institutes and the private sector gathered for a two day meeting in New Delhi this week, to deliberate upon how to advance their family planning agenda.

Family Planning FP2020 is a global partnership that “supports the rights of women and girls to decide, freely, and for themselves, whether, when, and how many children they want to have.” It arose from the 2012 London Summit on Family Planning where more than 20 governments made commitments to address the barriers that prevent women from gaining access to contraceptive information, services and supplies. FP2020 aims to enable 120 million more women and girls to use contraceptives by 2020.

Policy thrust

India is one of the ‘commitment’ countries. Even the looming shadow of the past family planning flop show hasn’t dampened the national enthusiasm and ambition when it comes to setting targets: “To provide family planning services and supplies free of cost to 200 million couples and 234 million adolescents by 2020,” says the FP2020 India document.

The plan is to use the extensive public health network, in collaboration with civil society organisations and the private sector. Of course, we still have to work out the finer details of how exactly these targets will be met. Where will family planning programmes figure in the health ministry’s agenda, considering the current budget cut? Will it be ahead of the diarrhoea control programme or after the tuberculosis mission? Or will something simply develop in an ad-hoc manner, based on the family planning advice that spills out of politicians’ mouths at every opportunity?

We could make family planning mandatory for all voters, regardless of their faith. Sexual and reproductive rights may be hailed as the cornerstones of sustainable development in other countries, but for us these are mere rhetoric.

We can keep parading liberal policies at international family planning forums to convince others of how invested we are in women’s empowerment and adolescent rights, but the truth is that we have little to celebrate.

The Gujarat High Court judgment that forbade a young woman who was impregnated by her rapist to get an abortion — with the judge’s advice to the victim being to “Bravely go ahead and deliver the child” — offers proof of the deeply embedded regressive attitudes of those in a position to make a difference.

Gender divide

Decades of attempts to convert the term ‘Family Planning’ into ‘Family Welfare’ and create an atmosphere of openness about sex, sexuality and reproductive health rights have failed miserably. The notion of birth control still reigns heavily in the Indian psyche, which is why female sterilisation remains so popular. Women’s rights have been reduced to consent attained with the bribe of blankets, cooking oil and petty cash. Even the memories of disasters such as the Chhattisgarh sterilisation tragedy will soon fade.

Not surprisingly, men’s rights aren’t as easily bought. Not even the offer of cars and TV sets can induce males to undergo sterilisation. After an initial burst of enthusiasm, the number of men opting for a No Scalpel Vasectomy (NSV) at male sterilisation camps initiated in the 1990s has dwindled dismally. Experts say the figure last year is down to one fourth of the number at that time. According to official documents, at least one in five women of ‘reproductive age’ doesn’t want to get pregnant.

While 98 per cent apparently have all the knowledge they need about spacing methods advocated by the national programme — condoms, birth control pills and IUDs (NHFS-3) — more than half the potential users don’t opt for any of these. Women throughout the world are celebrating the freedom offered by new contraceptive technologies, but females here have no such luck.

Convenient methods such as the injectable contraceptive and implant, popular in Sri Lanka and Nepal, have been shunned by the national programme with the convenient excuse that they support “contraceptive imperialism”.

So where, really, do we go from here? The answer partially lies in the 1990s hit song by the rap group Salt N Pepa, Let’s Talk About Sex Baby .

Written as a response to the censorship around that time in American mainstream media, the lyrics offer the single solution that family planning experts keep trying to skirt: ‘Let’s talk about sex for now/ to the people at home or in the crowd/ It keeps coming up anyhow/ Don’t decoy, avoid or make void the topic/ Cuz that ain’t gonna stop it.’

The writer is a microbiologist who writes about health issues

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