Family planning will reduce maternal mortality – NPC

Family planning and child spacing can help reduce maternal mortality in Nigeria, Chairman of the National Population Commission (NPC), Chief Eze Duruiheoma (SAN), has said. Duruiheoma stated this while speaking on the theme of this year’s World Population Day, ‘Family Planning, Birth Spacing: Empowering People, Developing Nations’. He said: “Most of these women with an […]

Family planning and child spacing can help reduce maternal mortality in Nigeria, Chairman of the National Population Commission (NPC), Chief Eze Duruiheoma (SAN), has said.

Duruiheoma stated this while speaking on the theme of this year’s World Population Day, ‘Family Planning, Birth Spacing: Empowering People, Developing Nations’.

He said: “Most of these women with an unmet demand for contraceptives live in 69 of the poorest countries on earth. Fulfilling their unmet demand would save lives by averting 60 million unintended pregnancies around the world and reducing maternal deaths by one third of the estimated 303,000 maternal deaths that occurred in 2016.”

He said that the data from the 2013 Nigeria Demographic Health Survey (NDHS) revealed that unmet need for family planning was currently 16 per cent among married women. He, therefore, urged the federal, state and local governments to invest more in the provision of sexual and reproductive services to the vast majority of the people.

The country Director of IPAS Nigeria, an international NGO dedicated to improving women’s reproductive health, Hauwa Shekarau, a barrister, said government needed to invest more money in providing free contraceptives for rural women.