Family planning as a part of maternal and child care and general health services

Abstract

The control of hazardous, unplanned pregnancy is one of three interrelated, leading health concerns in developing areas, and is fundamental to the management of the other two concerns, malnutrition and infections (the latter often synergistic with malnutrition). The dependence of child health and survival on the spacing of pregnancies is widely recognised by illiterate people who have been untouched by modernisation. These mothers have come to understand, from their own observations, the interdependence of birth spacing, child nurture and infections. They say that breast milk becomes poisonous, sours or dries up if the woman becomes pregnant while she is breast feeding. Mothers believe this is evidenced by the weanling wasting and suffering from diarrhoea, respiratory infections or one of the childhood infections (especially measles) which does away with the child in this precarious state. These factors contribute largely to the death of a large proportion of children, and to the chronic underdevelopment of those who survive.