Loudmouth, I snipped this from the Gutmacher Institute URL which
was provided earlier in the debate:

*However, approximately 201 million women in developing countries desire to either delay or limit their births, but do not have access to modern contraceptives; 64 million of these women use traditional methods such as periodic abstinence and withdrawal, which have high failure rates. The report concludes that providing family planning services to all of these women would prevent an additional 52 million unintended pregnancies and a wide range of deleterious outcomes from those pregnancies (see box).*

So I don't think I am missing anything. If you look at family planning
clinics which now operate, they are very discrete, woman can visit
without their husbands knowledge and approval. So they empower women
to make decisions about their lives right now, like how many kids
to have. Clearly there is unmet demand out there right now, if
you read the Gutmacher article.

What we can show is that when family planning services are provided
in countries, even third world ones, women choose to use these
services. They don't want to wait 100 years.

Lots of progress can me made, without third world women becoming
paid up members of the Western sisterhood.

Hi Yabby,

I'm sure that both Marie Stopes and I would agree with you, but the problem is not just formal availability but actual availability of family planning and birth control services for women. Yes indeed, I'm sure that many, many women would dearly like to have more control over their own bodies. But I don't think much of your chances of setting up a family planning clinic in, say, Pakistan's frontier provinces, where the Pushtu proverb that 'the only place for a woman is either in the home or in the grave' still rules.

Or indeed in many other countries around the world where reactionary cultural practices still inhibit (what was that again about 'all cultures being equally valid in their own context' ?), even PROhibit, the introduction of the services that you and Marie Stopes and I would advocate. Culture, as the ever-ready justification for gender inequality, is yet again the enemy of women's political rights, and the handmaiden of male power, as it has been since our Stone Age ancestors raided each others' territory for 'partners'.

Joe

Loudmouth, it is a little naive of you to blame all cultural practises
in the third world on males. If you travel through the third world,
you would be amazed to see how much power that women actually
have. But I grant you, men make the most noise :)

To make my point, I remind you that most female genital mutilation
is performed by women on other women. Culture involves both men
and women.

Just because some parts of Pakistan think that women should stay
home with the kids, does not mean that they are against family
planning. Many interpretations of Islam are in fact far more
practical about these things, then our very own backward Western
Catholic Church. Nobody campaigns globally against modern family
planning, as the Catholic Church does!

I followed this debate closely when George Bush came to power and
as a result, money for family planning to the third world was
cut dramatically, as George decided that abstinence was their
solution. (The Catholics and Fundies hounded him all the way over
this one)

The result was frankly a disaster. Women in Ethiopia leaving their
babies for the hyenas, or throwing them down wells, or Nigerian
women trying to give their children away. The list is endless.

We have women in the Philippines, begging to have their tubes tied
after 8 kids, but denied by the Catholic controlled hospitals.

Frankly the world needs a change of thinking and its time that the
Catholic Church was put back in its box. Give those women who want
family planning that choice, you will be amazed how they respond,
as the Gutmacher Institute confirms.

Thanks Yabby, but even female mutilation may be more a function of power within and between families, whereby older women have to keep the peace between their own families and the ones they have married into, as they perceive it, by mutilating their own daughters, effectively neutering them by extinguishing their sexual pleasure, in order to allay male fears.

Yes, you are spot-on about the Catholic Church's opposition to birth control. Many years ago, the great Irish actor Milo O'Shea was in a very funny series on Irish life, one episode of which he played a harassed father of a dozen or so kids, desperately trying to avoid another arrival, yet craving to satisfy his and his wife's passions. He hears about this thing called The Pill and scours Dublin to find some. He eventually has to do a deal with some crime bosses and rushes home with a packet and, while his wife awaits upstairs in joyful anticipation, swallows one and leaps up the stairs, two at a time.

I have often wondered what he would have done with the rest of the packet, or with a diaphragm instead. Or where he would have put a loop.