Host:
BONNIE ERBE
FRIDAY, JULY 26, 2013
Transcript provided by
DC Transcription – www.dctmr.com
(Begin video segment.)
DILA [Peer Educator]: I (met ?) some Muslim girls. I’m talking about sex and I’m teaching them about it.
SARITA PROVALKAVAT [Girls not Brides]: (Translated.) When I was 14, I realized that girls get married young in my village.
TANG CHOI YING (PH) [Family Planning Clinic Customer]: (Translated.) It was important for me to discuss and plan my family.
MELINDA GATES [Co-Founder, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation]: They’ll say to you, this is a life and death crisis for me because if I can’t space the births of my children, I can’t feed my children.
(End video segment.)
(Musical break.)
BONNIE ERBE: Women in developing countries. When experts speak about the challenges these women face, they speak of shocking statistics. Approximately 290,000 die every year from pregnancy related complications. More than 100,000 of those pregnancies are unintended. There are 80 million unintended pregnancies each year, half of them due to an unmet need for modern contraception. But behind each statistic is a woman with her own story.
Hello. I’m Bonnie Erbe. Here in the United States, contraception is still widely available, even if it is a hot political issue. So it’s really hard to imagine the barriers that women in developing nations face when they try to access quality reproductive services. This week, on To the Contrary, we show you how women and children’s lives are being saved in those countries by access to quality health services.
(Begin video segment.)
MS. ERBE: Advocates say if people really understood the impact lack of access to reproductive health services has on women and families, if we could all experience sadness and courage that they experience visiting with these women, change would come more quickly.
It’s this passion that brought princesses, first ladies, philanthropists, daughters of former presidents, actors and thousands of others, women and men together in Malaysia. Here, Women Deliver is about delivering solutions to maternal and child health and equality for women and girls.
MARY MWENDE [Global Give Back Circle]: I grew up in Kenya in a family of seven children and two parents, living in one room with no running water, no proper electricity, and no proper sanitation either.
BABATUNDE OSOTIMEHIN [Executive Director UNFPA]: Family planning is an essential human right. Family planning saves lives. It allows women and girls to make positive productive changes and choices, to seek education, to stay in school, to participate fully in society.
MS. ERBE: To the Contrary Executive Producer Cari Stein joined these global health leaders in Kuala Lumpur. She also visited a program where teenagers learn about reproductive health and a women’s reproductive health clinic.
CARI STEIN [Executive Producer, To the Contrary]: Malaysia is a diverse, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural country in Southeast Asia, where Malayans, Indians, Chinese and other ethnic groups live side by side. The national religion is Islam. However, the people enjoy religious freedom.
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a vibrant, modern city that’s known internationally for the iconic PETRONAS Towers. In the shadow of downtown Kuala Lumpur is Pudu, a small, poor, marginalized community where a family reproductive health services clinic struggles to meet the unmet needs of women.
MS. YING: Four boys, one girl.
MS. STEIN: Forty-four-year-old Tang Choi Ying comes this clinic for all of her health needs. It’s where she gets her yearly physical, blood pressure taken, and blood work. It’s also where she receives family planning services.
MS. YING: (Translated.) I was referred here from the time I had my first child, which was 23 years ago.
MS. STEIN: This young family also comes here to access birth control. Husband and wife are at the clinic with their first child. Together, they’ll make joint decisions about their future family.
MS. : (Translated.) I only want two babies. I have one baby. I only want one more for our future.
MS. STEIN: The clinic is a member of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which works in 170 countries. To the Contrary visited the center with IPPF’s director general and the president of Planned Parenthood of America.
MS. : We’re very honored to have you both here.
MS. STEIN: There were introductions.
MS. : This is Dr. Shang (ph).
MS. STEIN: And an exchange of information. They wanted to know clients’ preferred method of birth control.
CECILE RICHARDS [President, Planned Parenthood Federation of America]: What type of birth control?
MS. STEIN: Here it’s oral contraceptives.
MR. : It depends. There’s a newer methods – (inaudible).
MS. : Do you think there are people who have needs but cannot come because they are poorer than they could afford?
MS. : At the screening or – (inaudible)?
MS. : Yeah.
MS. : But those who can’t afford here are given free supplies.
TEWADROS MELESSE [Director General, IPPF]: What we do is really making family planning services, sexual reproductive health services available both as information, education, and to get the product out to those who are in need, especially for young people, marginalized groups who are displaced or who can’t afford to pay for the services.
MS. STEIN: Malaysia’s progress on women’s reproductive health makes it a fitting venue for the Women Deliver conference. Maternal mortality is down and there are more than 4,000 family planning facilities in operation.
JILL SHEFFIELD [Founder, Women Deliver]: The government decided that they needed to invest in girls and women because after independence, they were building a nation and they needed everybody to help do that.
Their maternal mortality rate at the time this happened was around 570 per 100,000 live births. That’s basically the measure. Do you know what it is today? Twenty-nine.
MR. MELESSE: We believe that family planning, sexual reproductive health, that’s the center of the human development. We say family planning is important to empower the individual, to care for girls, to care for women, and to save lives.
MS. STEIN: Pregnancy is the leading cause of death for women globally. Reducing maternal mortality is one of the eight Millennium Development Goals adopted by members of the U.N. and organizations dedicated to fighting poverty and raising the standard of living around the world.
Some countries have reached some of the goals, but not MDG Five. The commitment to reducing maternal mortality lags behind in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Since 1990, maternal deaths worldwide have dropped 47 percent. It’s a good start, but the target is 75 percent by 2015.
MS. GATES: The thing I want people to understand is for me it’s part of a much broader maternal and child health strategy.
MS. STEIN: Melinda Gates, one of the world’s leading advocates for family planning, came to Women Deliver to learn, teach and inspire. Gates meets with women in some of the poorest countries.
MS. GATES: I would be in the villages often wanting to talk to them about vaccines for their children, and they would eventually take the conversation around to, well, what about that, what they would call shot or vaccine for them – it’s a shot – that I used to get for family planning?
MS. STEIN: The women and their families have had a profound impact on Gates.
MS. GATES: In country after country, when I sit down and talk with women, they will tell you, first of all, that they’ll go to great lengths to get a contraceptive tool to use. They know about them. I’m amazed how many women are educated about contraceptives. And how vociferous they are about the fact that they had gotten perhaps a shot before, Depo-Provera, but then they’ll go to the health clinic and it’s not available. And they’ll say to you, this is a life and death crisis for me because if I can’t space the births of my children, I can’t feed my children.
MS. STEIN: Women often need to seek birth control without their husbands’ knowledge.
MS. GATES: They’ll bring into the conversation, I left the field for a day; my husband didn’t know where I was going; I walked 15 kilometers to this health care clinic, it’s not there; when am I going to be able to ever go again?
I think there’s nothing more inspiring than to see a woman and girl or girl raise her voice and to raise it again and again and again until people finally listen and respond. To me, that’s the fight of women’s empowerment.
This woman, Marianne (sp), she summed it up and she said to me, you know, what I want for this child – she was holding her baby – she said, I want every good thing for this child before I have another one. And I thought, that’s it. She’s captured for women what is universal in this. Every good thing for that child – that’s what a mother wants for her child no matter where she lives in the world.
MS. STEIN: So Gates put out a clarion call. She’s looking ahead, post-2015, with a goal to deliver modern contraceptives to another 120 million women by the year 2020.
MS. GATES: Our ability to create these complex partnerships and to change systems in dozens of countries will determine whether or not we get the results that we want in the future.
MS. STEIN: More than 200 million people have no access to family planning. Research shows when contraception increases, maternal deaths decrease.
MR. OSOTIMEHIN: In some countries, we don’t even have a budget line for reproductive, family planning.
MS. RICHARDS: In every country, it is really the combination of government and civil society and the medical profession that is making advances for women’s health. And I think that’s true in the United States as well. It takes that partnership.
MS. STEIN: The Women Deliver conference brings partners together. It’s the brain child of longtime rights advocate, Jill Sheffield. After getting married, Sheffield moved to Kenya and started volunteering at a family planning clinic.
MS. SHEFFIELD: On my 27th birthday, which was a little while ago, we had a clinic, and a woman came, and I took her history. And it turned out that she was 27. But there, the comparison absolutely finished because while she was 27, she had had 11 pregnancies and had six living children. She had the new baby on the front and the old baby on the back. She’d been on a bus since 4:00 a.m. in the morning, had been waiting in the hot equatorial sun to have family planning. And, at that moment, I thought, this is a truly brave young woman. And if she can be brave enough to come here, I can be brave enough to do something.
MS. STEIN: The Women Deliver conference brought together more than 4,500 people from 149 countries. They all had the same message: invest in girls and women and everybody wins.
MS. SHEFFIELD: When girls go to school for at least five years, their trajectory on the change in their life is like this. When she goes for seven or more, the trajectory changes to like that. And it’s not because she’s learned about kings and queens or capital cities or rivers and mountain ranges. It’s the fact of being in school. Her mother-in-law looks at her differently. Her husband looks at her differently. The community regards her differently. And there are miraculous things that happen as a side effect to the educational investment.
JENI KLUGMAN [Director, Gender and Development World Bank Group]: In conversations with ministries of finance, with government, with donors, it’s also important to make the economic case. And so we show the gains not only to the individual women themselves but also to their families, to their communities, to the nations and to the world at large.
MS. STEIN: Thousands of people are working on issues relating to maternal mortality and empowering women and girls. Their tools include education, medication, and other health services and strategies. One of those strategies is to invest in midwives. Experts say that could save more than 3.5 million women and newborns by 2015.
LESLIE MANCUSO [President and CEO, JHPIEGO]: All of us working together to look for ways to improve the quality of health care to the most vulnerable populations.
MS. KLUGMAN: Investments are needed. And there’s a lot that we know about what works. So now, for example, I think something like 99 percent more maternal deaths actually happen in developing countries. So there are technical and medical solutions available to avert really what are quite preventable deaths and morbidity. And the costs of the deaths and morbidity far exceed the costs of actually investing in prevention.
MS. STEIN: Experts also say ending child marriage would save lives. Serita, a young woman from a rural town in India, convinced her parents to let her stay in school instead of getting married at the age of 14.
MS. PROVALKAVAT: (Translated.) I explained to my father what I learned in life skill education class that getting married early has several risks. One of my friends who got married early, she was pregnant when she was young, and she died in childbirth and her baby. And I also talked about how it is important for a girl to be educated and be independent.
MS. STEIN: With nearly three billion people under the age of 25, the reality of a better tomorrow will ultimately be the job of the next generation of leaders. They include Barbara Bush and Chelsea Clinton. Like her mother –
HILLARY CLINTON [Former Secretary of State]: It is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights.
MS. STEIN: – Chelsea Clinton is a human rights advocate.
CHELSEA CLINTON [Human Rights Advocate]: I find unconscionable that in the 21st century, people continue to die from things that we’ve known how to prevent and treat since the 20th century.