I have strong feelings and thoughts about reproductive health and families and population management in the overall well-being of a country.
However, these feelings come in two flavours: First, I don’t believe in unmanaged, perpetual growth because it is messy and strains the environment and, second, I own the equipment that grows new human beings and bring them into the world.
The first reason is largely impersonal, a matter of policy that makes me worry about things like vaccinations and early childhood nutrition, education systems, sanitation, the labour market, how easy it is to buy guns in America.
Very conceptual. The second reason is super-personal: I have two X chromosomes.
Once upon a time, when access to libraries and data was a part of my life, I could take for granted, I got interested a little bit in medical history. Not medicine per se, because of my limitations with science and general distaste for the idea of touching strangers, but the history of how we got where we are now which is pretty awesome.
I suspect some of it has to do with having medical people in my life, but also encountering unpreventable HIV/Aids deaths at an early age.
My personal favourite is antibiotics, thanks for asking. Followed by vaccines. Followed by anything to do with the health of the female human body which, in my opinion, should be the standard model for all medical instruction rather than the male body.
Medicine, you see, is just as sexist as the rest of everything. What truly drove this home for me is the shocking story of Western medicine’s slow and terrible grasp of how babies are made.
The modern medical establishment mostly knows now, and safer childbirth has become a worldwide phenomenon.
I can’t help but think of my great-grandmother who, I was told, was a well-respected midwife.
Traditional African medical technologies are an under-studied area: I know that the Caesarian section is believed to have been an East African innovation. Which is what making the current Tanzanian dialogue on reproductive health rather confusing.
In all the noise about virility and sexual morality I have detected an anxiety about fertility, and even more specifically an obsession with controlling issues like the gender of a desired child.
Lackadaisical approach
Proto eugenics, if you will. I know that the last administration’s leader had a bullish view of this matter: Just give birth willy-nilly, somehow the health and welfare of newborns and mothers and families would magically be taken care of. This has not been my experience. And, frankly, there is an underlying danger in this lackadaisical approach to reproductive health, which is affecting us negatively.
So this is my polite way of saying that next week I want to bring a feminist lens to the situation. This is fair warning as I know how the f-word has a negative connotation for many people. But what must be done must be done.
Let’s talk about sex next week.
Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report; Email [email protected]
Source: The East African
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