Rebel Cultures, Women’s Lives & Family Planning

Cultures are powerful, persuasive and dominant among communities in Nigeria. Cultural beliefs could sometimes hinder and alter saving women’s life. Cultural practices leave vast majority of women with a disfigured future or complications in child bearing. Rebel cultures such as female genital mutilation (FGM), teenage marriage(and pregnancy) as left women across Nigeria with malnutritioned healthcare and a dare need to escape from being one of the six(6) victims of death every hour.

Rural culture defines family planning as the eligible process which every female child will under going while growing up in the course of preparing for marital life. Some of the notable points that need to be attained in rebel culture family planning include female circumsion and ability to conceive over a long period of years. Family planning in itself means voluntary limitation or child-birth spacing or planned interventions of conception in order to control fertility. Family planning plays a dynamic role in maternal and child health.

Rebel culture continues to strife with modern family planning techniques. One thing is common to both factors, the lives of women and children involved. Maternal mortality, which is death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 hours of termination of pregnancy, regardless of the site or duration of pregnancy from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management. Infant mortality rate is the number of children dying under a year of life per thousand live births.

Causes of maternal mortality include haemorrphage (24.8%), infection (14.9%), eclampsia (12.9%), obstructed labour (6.9%), unsafe abortion (12.9%), other direct causes ( 7.9%) and indirect causes (19.8%) {International Planned Parenthood Federation}. All this causes either emerge from difficult cultural practices or are the root causes of the 145 women in Nigeria that die daily from this significant causes. Obstructed labour seem to be one of the lowest cause of maternal deaths.

Examining some of the root causes of obstructed labour including female genital mutilation (FGM), a rebel culture which comes back to hunt women during marital sexual intercourse by creating a painful process due to the barrier scar tissue from FGM operation. FGM also cause difficult in mechanism of giving birth. An obstruction in the process of giving birth is even more complicated, if the women in labour is been attended too by an untrained tradition birth attendant with crude infected tools. A married female teenage with a circumsion scar (FGM) finds the pain unbearable and wonders if this is the cultural family planning process, is same one that requires her to give births till adulthood or to the end of her biological clock. Women who have undergone FGM require a sensitive antenatal care and may be apprehensive about pelvic examination. FGM is a rebel culture that is willing to be solely responsible for maternal death and stillbirths.

Women infected with diseases before pregnancy, during pregnancy and after pregnancy can ruin the dream of national health safety. Women are directly connect the family, women infected with HIV/AIDS can infect the man and reduce the chance of safe health of infant. Pregnant women and children are most susceptible to infections due to temporal reduction in the state of their immune system and therefore need appropriate health care at all times. Infections can be a result of FGM, refuses to attend antenatal care clinics while been attended to by traditional birth attendants.

Nigeria expects 180-200 million pregnancies per year even though 75 million of them are unwanted pregnancies (unwanted within a family or outside the family) which therefore results to 20 million unsafe abortions. Hence chances of dying from pregnancy and childbirths is about 1 in 13. Family planning methods can help connect and save the life of our women through natural methods, modern family methods and ensure availability of suitable method from the user’s perspective. Family planning methods include barrier methods (male and female condom or diaphragm), vaginal methods: spermicides, implants (Intrauterian contraceptives devices IUCD).

Rebel cultures have values that make it difficult to be credited as a system that can ransom our women, children and community. The biggest challenge in breaking through rebel cultures includes poor male involvement, low educational levels of female, male-child preference, misconception of family planning methods and its reversal, poverty and ignorance, use of children as assets and poor availability of family planning services at rural areas.