The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, of which Melinda Gates is co-founder, has made it a mission to ensure that millions of women in developing societies have access to safe birth control measures. Since 2012, Ms Gates has been leading a worldwide campaign to get 120 million more women access to birth control by 2020. The BMGF has donated over one billion dollars towards family planning.
Never before has this fight for a woman’s right to decide if, when, and how many children she wants to have been more important. The recent India wide study on how ten million women in the country are forced to resort to unsafe abortions every year underlines the critical need to make contraceptive options available.
The study, done by the IndiaSpend team, highlights that myths and misinformation about contraceptive methods are still widely prevalent despite India having the longest government-backed family planning campaign in the world. Millions of women still lack access to contraceptive options. They are left with no option but to take over-the-counter pills or undergo dangerous, unhygienic surgeries to end pregnancies.
A 2016 Lancet report highlights how distant the prospect of safe abortions remains for rural Indian women. This is the case even nearly five decades after abortion was legalized in India. In the absence of safe methods, sales of popular abortion pills remain abnormally high.
Widening the basket of contraceptive choices, as the government did earlier this year, is a much welcome, long overdue step. But to be truly effective, these choices have to reach the millions of women in our smaller towns and villages. That needs better delivery systems, better training of doctors, and a mass awareness campaign. All of which remains a giant, gaping hole in our FP program.
