Having many children bad for ecosystem, says expert

An international expert in health matters, Mrs. Offiong Enah, has raised the alarm on the problem of inadequate skilled birth attendants in the country, adding that having many children could destabilise the ecosystem.The expert, who is the Country Representative of the Centre for Development and Population Activities, said this in an exclusive interview with SATURDAY PUNCH in Abuja at a dissemination and consensus building conference on human resources for health, ambulance and other emergency transport services.The conference, with the theme, Safe motherhood in Nigeria: Assessment of human resources and emergency transport services, was jointly organised by CEDPA and the Federal Ministry of Health.Enah said, The awareness about family planning in the North has been low before. But we have worked there for the past 10 years. Many states and local governments in the North have indeed created an awareness that you dont just need to have a child because you are procreating.You only have a child that you can care for. When you have many children, the ecosystem is destabilised and the womans health also matters. So, family planning is a major component of what we do: that is controlling the rate of procreation.Couples should plan their families because a planned family is a healthy family. When you plan your family, the risk of mothers dying is reduced; the risk of the child dying is also reduced.She said women were marginalised everywhere and people didnt consider womens existence. They exist only when people want them to exist, she said. What we do is to bring people to a table of realisation and make them understand that if a woman is dying, then your child will suffer. If a woman is not recognised, you will not know what the family and indeed the whole community and the generation would come to be in the future because the decision makers are largely men.We are deliberating on skilled birth attendants because maternal mortality is on the increase; women are dying and the children are also dying and it affects the whole household.We are bringing the stakeholders in the health sector and the Federal Government to see how we can stop women from dying. That is why we are here.
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