We focus a lot of our efforts — rightfully — on access to basic healthcare, including things like birth control, sexual health education and HIV/AIDS prevention. But it’s essential to keep in mind that a good international women’s health policy also covers the very basics, like access to clean water, in tandem with these other things. And, as an Ethiopian study suggests, clean water may do more to benefit women’s reproductive health than we had imagined.
Just one major problem: In benefiting women’s health, it increases their fertility. Which is great, since an overall increase in a population’s fertility is generally a sign of good health. But since these women don’t have adequate access to family planning tools, it means they have far more children than they did before. Which, again, would be great if they were choosing to have these children, and if having them was indicative of better economic, social and health conditions. But it isn’t. And while the women are healthier, their children are starving — which is arguably better than dying of disease and infection from the tainted water, but not by much.
This boost in birth rate takes a toll on children’s health. The investigators found that kids were more likely to be malnourished, based on their height and weight, in villages with taps than in those without.
This could be simply because families are sharing their scarce food between more children. Or perhaps low birth-weight babies, who previously would not have survived the trauma of birth, are now surviving but not thriving.
Of course, in the aggregate, this is, at the very least, better than the previous situation. But it’s worth noting here that a good health policy for developing nations works on a variety of levels: It includes clean water, food, access to family planning services, adequate pre-natal and well-baby care, health education, immunizations and disease prevention, and on and on. It can’t be addressed on a single level. Imagine how much better this situation would be if these women had clean water and were able to control their own fertility so that they had as many children as they desired, not as many as fate offered? What would their lives look like if they could afford to feed all their kids, and got to watch them grow up into adulthood instead of watching them die of disease and infection before they had clean water, and then watching others waste away after the clean water taps were introduced? A good international policy would address this issue comprehensively instead of offering simplistic moralisms and short-term solutions. The Bush administration’s agenda of starving family planning clinics and disallowing these women access to basic reproductive health tools doesn’t help women, children or families.
Thanks to TangoMan for the link.
Similar Posts:
- Global Gag Rule: Denying Access to Women Worldwide by Jill October 26, 2005
- Life without family planning by tigtog July 19, 2007
- Bush Cuts Family Planning Funding by Jill February 15, 2006
- Educating is good, fixing the problem is better by Jill September 24, 2007
- Pro-choice Congresspeople take steps to prevent abortion; “pro-lifers” predictably opposed by Jill June 22, 2007
The whole infusion of religious principles into the family planning issue, especially when tied with foreign aid, I think is a travesty that appeals to religious shortsightedness and sense of piousness. People have sex. Children result from sex. It’s nuts to expect people not to have sex. So, we improve the lives of these women and thereby harm their children because of Administration squeamishness about confronting basic human behavior.
The consequences of this policy decision are going to ripple out for generations. These African kids are malnourished and lacking in micronutrients. Their health, development, and cognition are impacted from the deprivation that results from not having adequate resources in their lives. Even those children who survive into adulthood will have to deal with the resulting impairments. The costs of malnourishment are born for a lifetime, not just for the period of malnourishment. Africa is now a basketcase and this stupid policy insures that the situation won’t change. We’re going to be dealing with another lifetime’s worth of aid to Africa because a President perverts foreign aid in order to please illogical religious sensabilities.
Ah, Tangoman, I like you more every day.
yes… that was… rational and well reasoned.
what’s your game, tango?
“As much as I hate abortion, I hate poor Africans more, those filthy darkies?”
“I’m biding my time until the policy actually changes for the better, then I have an ideological stick to branish against your dirty liberals to pander to those people that were speaking for that policy now?”
“That evil man who kept trolling all over the place was actually my evil twin from the Mirror Universe. he had a beard and all, but you can’t really see, since we’re on the internet?”
what’s your game, tango?
To push back against post-modernist social constructivism. The name calling tactic you so favor worked wonders in killing The Human Genome Diversity Project because the scientists there didn’t want to be tarred as racists by liberal fanatics. Big loss for humanity, thankfully though the International Haplotype Map Project took its place because people fought back against mindless charges of racism. That’s the meta-game I’m playing. People either believe in Creationism or they don’t.
Karpad, these issues aren’t going away, no matter how much you vituperate. So, what I’m doing is talking about issues as they are rather than as how they should be but never will be. The best way to fix a problem is to first understand it.
Africa has lots of problems. Lots. Male behavior towards women. Female behavior towards men. Cultural ethics. Captial formation. Land title issues. Malnutrition. Irresponsible sexual behavior. Climate. The list goes on. It’s harsh to point it out, that’s true, but no one benefits by sugarcoating these issues. For instance, if you want to raise the IQ of some African peoples then you need to introduce micronutrients into their diets, dramtically increase breastfeeding and the duration of breatfeeding, and insure proper diet. If it’s too harsh to acknowledge how poorly the peoples of Africa do with IQ tests, then you ignore solutions which are known to work and instead focus on feel-good solutions which don’t work. So, what do you want to do – protect feelings or work towards a solution? Follow the solution and you’ve given them a boost and this boost translate into better outcomes all down the line. Ghana has decided to actually implement a solution along the lines I’ve laid out here. Good for them.
If you’re a racist that doesn’t give a shit about Africa, then let things continue on as they are. Stunted IQ, stunted health, famine, corruption, ethnic warfare, rampant crime, etc.
“That evil man who kept trolling all over the place
I never troll. Your buddy Amanda asked me to leave, so I left. She’s good at bombast, not so good at analysis. She serves her market niche quite well. More power to her.
And as for the content of Jill’s post, well the issue is a simple one. Lives are being devastated, not just for a few years, but for lifetimes, by a stupid policy that isn’t even internally consistent. The policy only has surface appeal to Christians, but no depth of appeal to Christian principles. So, any Christian who looks at the consequences of the policy should be horrified by the outcomes. These children won’t recover to normalcly after the famine has passed. They’re permanently handicapped. It’s stupid to help with one hand, provide water resources, and to take away with the other hand, weaken and sicken the children that result from increased fertility.
Let’s put the dicks away and stay on topic, shall we?
I was at a party in DC about ten years ago, with kind of a B/C-list Washington crowd (it was my mother’s cousin’s husband’s 50th birthday party, and I was jobhunting, so I figured I’d go and network). There was a woman there who was the birthday boy’s cousin, who hadn’t seen him for years. She was kind of plain and nerdy, and didn’t really fit the crowd. She was also very quiet. She was wearing a very unusual silver necklace, and as things were kind of winding down, someone asked her about it.
That’s when we found out that she was a relief worker who had very recently returned from Rwanda, then in the full grip of its civil war and refugee crisis. She told us that when she first got to the refugee camps with her organization, she would pass thousands of bodies on the road from where they were staying to where they were working. Interestingly, the first thing they did was take a census and identify everyone in the camp, even before they dug a well. But then they got the well in and got everyone immunized and treated (which is one reason they did the census, so they could keep track), and within the week, the number of bodies had greatly dwindled.
There are so many small things that can improve the lives of people in Africa and in other impoverished nations, but they’re not necessarily all offered in the same place or in any kind of comprehensive way. You need Doctors Without Borders AND the Gates Foundation’s vaccine funding AND AIDS treatment AND family-planning AND clean water AND nutrition AND mosquito control AND micro-loans to help people start small businesses AND education for girls. Each one is most successful in concert with the others.
tango, that is officially TL;DR, but I’m pleased you have genuine concern for the developing world. But I should hope you can admit that it isn’t a trait shared by many on your side of the political spectrum.
your side of the political spectrum.
Where would you imagine that to be?