Family Planning Board brings back ‘two kids’ campaign
OVER the last couple of days, the National Family Planning Board (NFPB) has been stepping up its campaign to get more couples to plan their families.
“Every couple needs to plan, when to have children,” said Executive Director Dr Olivia McDonald. “They need to plan how many to have and how frequently to have them,” she added.
McDonald was speaking last Sunday at a church service at the Portmore Missionary Church to mark the start of National Family Planning Week.
McDonald noted that in planning for two children, couples would be able to invest more in childcare, reduce the economic burden on the family and help break the cycle of poverty.
“As the Board enters its next five-year programme, the goal is to effect further reduction in the proportion of the unplanned pregnancies,” said McDonald, who noted that this figure had declined from 75 per cent in 1989 to 62 per cent in 2002.
McDonald pointed out that these goals would be realised through:
. expanding access to existing family-planning options that are underutilised;
. improving access to reproductive health informa-tion and services to adolescents and men; and
. promoting safe sexual behaviour, attitudes and practices to reduce the prevalence of STIs.
McDonald also read a message from Health Minister Horace Dalley, in which he noted that the annual observation of National Family Planning Week provides a viable opportunity for the ministry, through the NFPB, to intensify its promotion of family-planning practices.
This year’s theme, ‘Plan for two.it’s the smart thing to do’ is intended, Dalley said, “to remind us that parenthood involves a responsibility to provide for children – given two being a manageable number.”
A similar programme was promoted in the 1980s, when the NFPB promoted its Two is Better Than Too Many campaign, encouraging Jamaican women to have no more than two children.
According to Dalley, findings from the latest Reproductive Health Survey indicate that unplanned pregnancies remained high, with adolescents within the 15-17 age group being particularly vulnerable.
Meanwhile, host Pastor of the church, Reverent Garnett Roper, told the large gathering that the family “is essential as a moral and spiritual unit”.
He noted that the threat to the society was not from outside, but was from within.
“The fact that morality and moral consideration are not part of the common conversation and conduct is the reason why we savage and brutalise each other,” he remarked, adding that God is left out of conversations, except when we need someone to blame for what has gone wrong.