Family Planning as a Social Vaccine?

By Contributor | April 14, 2011

Proponents of family planning at the UN often present it in the context of women’s empowerment that enables her to choose her family size. This week during the Commission on Population and Development, Amy Tsui, Director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health at Johns Hopkins University, revealed another take on family planning.

“Family planning is to maternal survival what a vaccine is to child survival,” she told the audience. “Family planning is a social vaccine.”

The analogy here is simple, but striking. Vaccines are meant to help children survive by preventing potentially deadly diseases. Family planning, then, is intended to help the mother survive by avoiding what is most threatening to her health –an “unwanted” pregnancy.

But what is it about an “unwanted” pregnancy that makes it so dangerous? One can think of ectopic pregnancies or complications of pregnancy with cancer and how those types of pregnancy can be life-threatening – but family planning cannot discern and prevent these “dangerous” pregnancies; it just prevents pregnancy itself.

Pregnancy itself is de-facto dangerous if a woman does not have access to quality obstetric care, and this situation almost exclusively arises among the poor in developing nations. Is family planning suggested in order to prevent these sorts of pregnancies? If so, it is a pitifully misguided response to the real needs of pregnant mothers. But perhaps even more offensive is that in this analogy, pregnancy – and thus the child of the poor itself- is treated as a disease which must be prevented, rather than the beginning of a life that deserves to be nourished and respected.

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