Govt and NGO to undertake contraception exercise

By MATTHEW VARI

Sunday, January 26, 2014 (Sunday Chronicle, PNG)




THE government through the Department of National Planning is embarking on an exercise to roll out access to contraceptions.

Minister Responsible for National Planning Charles Abel, revealed this at the Final Figures for the 2011 National Census.

He said that the department were in discussions with Rotary Australia and Marie Stopes, a non- governmental organisation specialised in sexual and reproductive health.  

“We are sitting with Marie Stopes and Rotary Australia to begin a program of rolling out access to contraception, particularly for young women and particularly women in general,” he said.

“Through partnerships with them we are going out there to make it contraceptions accessible to defined numbers as a subset to control fertility.”

The minister used the sentiments of Sumkar  MP, Ken Fairweather, of Karkar Island, which he said was an example of what can happen if the country was not conscious about this issue.

“Karkar is a perfect example of that, an island with 60,000 people and 50,000 hectares of land, it is simply overflowing.”

“We have a direct policy intervention there where we will roll out that program with Marie Stopes will implants to control fertility on a voluntary basis.”

“If you make women available to control the number of children, or manage it is a great empowerment factor for women. Their able to get more mature, their able to further their education and consequently make better choices in the family including who they marry, when they can have children, and so on- it is a vicious cycle.”

He added that the state wanted to make an intervention by giving women the choice.

“Many of our women in the country are dis-empowered because they get pregnant too early, and part of the consequence they tend to get married because they are pregnant not for other reasons.”