No population control without women at the reins

The fact that 800,000 children die in Pakistan every year is reason enough for women to be included at all levels of policymaking. This country thrives on knee-jerk reactions over trivial matters but has glacial speed when responding to catastrophes. Pakistan has missed its family planning targets yet again, not by a few thousand, but by an increase of about four million. The country is daring to make a new projection by 2025 that it is bound to miss again because of the fact that women in Pakistan are not in command of their bodies. Their husbands, mother-in-laws and their level of poverty are.

We have secured the last place in the region in terms of average births per women. Nepal and Bangladesh are ahead of us. We fault religious beliefs for this state, but Iran didn’t let religion come in the way of meeting its family planning targets, which just goes to show that our call to tradition is just a guise for our laziness and incompetence. Iran made contraceptives widely available at all public hospitals and clinics.



In our culture, we throw young girls into marriages at ages when they have not yet understood their bodies. There are only hushed voices and battered rebels. Girls aren’t encouraged to figure their own lives out before becoming mothers. Don’t bear a child unless you are in a safe environment. Don’t become a serial mother just because you can’t enforce child-spacing rules with your spouse.

The right to say no is practically non-existent for women here, many of whom breed until they bleed. They continue to give birth to baby girls until they have that gold-plated boy who will most likely grow into an entitled brat. They keep trying to gain some prestige in society until they have enough humans bonded to them by an overbearing code of honour. No surprise, then, that most women in hostile familial situations are encouraged to remain in the family at least until the kids grow up. It’s unlikely that women in such situations will take a stand but what I want to do is to ask the policymakers, the politicians and the self-professed revolutionaries to pause for a moment. To halt whatever they think may be more important — such as religious leaders taking selfies with internet sensations, calling ex-diplomats treacherous or having border wars — and for the sake of the 40 per cent of this country under the burdensome rock of poverty, urgently get behind the family planning cause.

Ever since General Ziaul Haq, we have cowed down to religious leaders who label family planning as un-Islamic and completely ignore that hardly half the country is attended to by a skilled medical practitioner. Sooner rather than later, we will have to give our women — rural or urban — a better way out than becoming a vending machine. They wear and tear. They feel hurt. They want to spend more of their time caring for a child than tending to a herd.

Dr Zeba Sathar, the country director of the Population Council of Pakistan, in her research, found that around seven million women in the country want to space births or no longer have children, but that they are unable to do so. Those seven million are, essentially, caged animals. If women continue to be disempowered, then this country will never emerge as an economic survivor. Out of the 800,000 children that die every year, 35 per cent die of malnutrition. The only problem is that this happens with a whimper and not a bang. We only respond to dog whistles.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 24^th, 2016.

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