Birth Spacing helps Women to get Stronger & Healthier for another Pregnancy
According to Mr. Famara Fatty, the Senior Programs Officer at the Reproductive, Maternal, Neonatal, Child and Adolescent Health (RMNCA) unit of the Ministry of Health in the Gambia, birth spacing helps Women get stronger and healthier for another pregnancy.
He was responding to questions during an interview recently with this medium on the linkage between Family Planning and the reduction of maternal mortality in the Gambia.
Mr. Fatty: Why were we sending our women to the mothers to do their breastfeeding? It is because we don’t want them to get pregnant very soon while they are breastfeeding.
There are two things, one is we want to make sure that the baby who is being breastfed is not weaned very soon. Before, the thinking was that if a woman gets pregnant the breast milk is no longer good for the one who is sucking.
But no, what is happening around that time is a good practice of a wife getting away from the husband for the baby to have time with the mother to get all the care and attention from the mother. The second reason is that the time they have to spend breastfeeding the baby is what we are looking for in Family Planning.
Getting pregnant after that means the woman is strong enough to have another baby. Similarly, modern Family Planning is all about enforcing that particular idea of being away from the Husband. This time around, be around your husband and use contraceptives to space your pregnancies. The use of spacing in pregnancy medically is to get you stronger for another pregnancy so that you don’t have the problems that may come when they are too close.
For example a placenta, as big as the placenta is, can you imagine where it was attached in the womb and it is detached after birth, and that is an open wound that needs to get healed to be able to contain another pregnancy. It needs time for that healing to take place. In that way, we need to make sure that everything is done to make sure that healing takes place.
This is why the spacing period of two years or more comes in from every doctrine to make sure that healing takes place and all other organs are ready for another pregnancy so that we have that very brilliant, healthy and intelligent child that grows within us without any problems. In this case, this woman can do everything a woman needs to do in a labour ward to deliver.
Otherwise, if there is that frequency of pregnancy without planning for a family and time to get the pregnancies spaced, a good number of women would still do as other women are doing, but many women are not going to be able to do it because the organs and system are weak to carry another pregnancy.
That weakness can bring about ill health that can be chronic, an emergency that can lead to the deaths we are experiencing.
Reporter: When we talk about Family Planning, what comes to mind for many is birth spacing or not having children at all. Can Family Planning help women to conceive?
Mr. Fatty: Yes, this brings us to what I said, that Family comprised of a father, mother, and offspring. Where these two have come together and the third one has not come, family planning is there to help you to have a child. Many are looking at the Contraceptive method of Family Planning and not Family Planning as a whole.
Family Planning helps to counsel couples who are in difficulties. We have seen married couples who are in difficulties, and their relationship gets a bit sour and sometimes gets to the tougher side.
Family Planning can always come in to help because, many a time, it is about the couples being together for some time and are not able to have a child, and you have a lot of forces that are pushing in certain things that are making it difficult.
With Family Planning, we can come in to help you address some of these issues. Family Planning is more than contraception; it helps you in having children and all other benefits.
Author: Halimatou Ceesay
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