Steven Mosher has put paid to the notion that women are frantic for access to birth control and abortion. While UN-funded programs prioritise family planning devices, women themselves have other needs.
PRI actually took a survey to prove this point:
A total of 370 women were interviewed by one of ten trained interviewers in different districts of the city. The interviewers went door-to-door in their respective districts.[2] Those interviewed were shown a list of 15 different public health programs, and asked to order the list in terms of their own personal needs, putting their most pressing need first and their least important need last. The health programs listed were reproductive Health,[3] vaccinations, HIV/AIDS, Family and Child Abuse, Natural Family Planning, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Lifestyle, Maternal and Neonatal, Potable Drinking Water and Sewage, Psychological, Cholera, Diarrhea, Tuberculosis, Malaria, and Leprosy. Other information collected included age, religion, marital status, and prior history of contraception, sterilization, and abortion.
So of the 15 items, where did reproductive health land? Dead last. The top priority was vaccinations, which indicated they wanted their children to live.
As it turns out, the people of Mexico have a far better understanding of the differences between Natural Family Planning and reproductive health care than the controllers. And they vastly prefer a method over which they have intimate control -- NFP -- to the permanent, or semi-permanent methods imposed by the National Population Council and the U.N. Population Fund.
Those we talked to were not using NFP as shorthand for "family planning." And those who expressed, in the "comments" section, a desire for more education in NFP were not thereby expressing a preference for fewer
children. Indeed, in the Mexican context it is just as likely that they would use this additional education in NFP to conceive a child as it is that they would use it to delay conception. Their interest in NFP centered on the fact that they themselves, and not some distant, even foreign, government agency, would determine the number and spacing of their children.
Bear in mind that those with whom we spoke were not backward, tribal people, but highly Westernized and educated residents of one of Mexico's most modernized cities. Note also that their prioritization of their health care needs was highly rational, that is to say, that it accords well with the real diseases and health problems that they and their families must contend with on a daily basis. Why should their views on their own health care needs, including their rejection of so-called reproductive health care, not be taken seriously in planning health care programs?
That's a big part of what we call the "feminine genius." Please remember the prayer campaign for the good work being done to counter the darkness spread by the UN. Upcoming UN battles will be fierce, as always.
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