Birth Control a Key to Aiding Burkina Faso Women

“The biggest stumbling block, as always, is men.”

Family health planner Brigitte F. Thiombiano was talking about her fledgling birth control program to promote the use of contraceptives in hope of liberating Burkina Faso’s women from poor health and drudgery and preserving the environment. Pope John Paul II advised against the use of contraceptive devices during his recent visit and the country’s majority religions--Islam and animism--encourage large families.

“Anyone who opposes artificial contraception here is condemning our women to an existence little removed from slavery and our country to a vicious cycle of degradation,” Thiombiano said in an interview.

“Men here oppose contraception because they believe their women will become promiscuous. More educated men feel threatened by the fact that contraception frees women from the never-ending cycle of child-bearing and child-caring and gives them time for other interests.”

Health workers, government officials and international aid agencies say birth control is the only way to slow a population growth that threatens the lives of women, children and a fragile environment in Africa’s Sahel, the area below the Sahara.

The Pope demanded that “the right to life be defended ceaselessly” and called on rich countries to feed Africans and not refuse them the means to survive “in fratricidal indifference.”

But countries trying to help Burkina Faso say birth control is the key to a better life for its people. Women now begin bearing an average of seven children at the age of 15, and 14 of every 100 babies die. In the United States, the infant mortality rate is one in 100.

The southward encroachment of the Sahara makes population control even more important.

“Rapid population growth has accentuated the processes of deforestation and desertification . . . and increased the vulnerability to shortfalls in food production,” said a report by the U.S. government’s Agency for International Development.

Selling of contraceptive devices is a difficult task in a country with a religiously founded tradition of large families, and where a woman’s worth is judged by the number of children she produces.

Only 10% of the population is Roman Catholic, but the church’s influence is strong through its control of private schools and clinics that reach as many Burkinabe as government-run facilities.

Conflicts in approaches to birth control are evident even among workers dedicated to its aims.

Dr. Meba Kagone, the U.S.-trained director of health services for Ouagadougou, the capital, said that in an effort to make the program more acceptable, regulations require women to get written permission from their husbands to take contraceptives.

Thiombiano said health workers do not enforce the rule.

“It is every woman’s right to preserve her health through contraception. In fact, we have many young schoolgirls coming to our clinics.”

She and Kagone said many women hide contraceptive pills from their husbands, and it is common to hear stories of angry men throwing the pills away when they find them.

Sometime it is the other way around. Magistrate Alidou Ouedraogo told of a complaint he heard from a villager.

“The man said he only discovered when his wife fell pregnant that she had been pricking holes into his condoms,” he said.

On the whole, however, health workers are pleased with the progress made since a 1920 Napoleonic law prohibiting contraception was scrapped in 1985. The law was inherited from the French colonizers of Burkina Faso, previously called Upper Volta.

Statistics are scarce and unreliable, but Kagone estimated that 6% of Burkinabe women use contraceptives, 19% in the capital.

Thiombiano said further efforts must be tied to a national literacy campaign.

“Women have to be educated and men must be educated to change their outdated views on women, who are after all in the majority.”

Fifty-two percent of Burkina Faso’s 8 million people are women.

“We have to promote women if we want to develop. Women rise first in the morning and go to bed last. . . . The long hours and arduous tasks are a huge crime,” she said.