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City revives dormant family planning campaign
The birds and the bees: Officers from a family planning body give a seminar on birth control at a subdistrict office in Kayu Manis, East Jakarta, recently
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The birds and the bees: Officers from a family planning body give a seminar on birth control at a subdistrict office in Kayu Manis, East Jakarta, recently. JP/Prodita Sabarini
Wiwi, a midwife at the Kayumanis subdistrict in East Jakarta, showed dozens of women pictures of human reproductive organs, teaching them about contraception and campaigning for family planning (KB).
Wiwi was one of many midwives campaigning for family planning recently.
Following on from the National Awakening Day that fell on May 20, the Jakarta Family Planning and Women and Community Empowerment Body (BPMPKB) declared 2009 the year to revitalize the family planning campaign.
At the launch day, every single one of the 267 subdistricts in Jakarta held a campaign for family planning.
"This will be the year of awakening for family planning," head of BPMPKB Tuty Mulyati said.
The era of the "Two Children is Enough" national family planning slogan being drilled in the nation's mind and married women starting conversations asking each other which contraceptive methods they use, have slowly faded away with the fall Soeharto in 1998.
"Before 1998, the state was very active in campaigning for family planning. Everyone knows about KB, everyone knows the song and the slogan *Two children is enough'," Tuty said.
"But, the active media campaign on KB has faded away since the Reform era," she said.
One of former President Soeharto's legacies, population control through family planning programs, brought the country's fertility rate from 5.6 children per family in 1967-70 down to 2.85 children per family in 1994. In 2000, the rate declined to 2.34 children per family.
Invasive family planning campaigns and programs caused dramatic increases in the use of contraception.
"The funding for the program back then was huge. There was also considerable financial aid from the international community," Tuty said.
So invasive was the campaign, the message is still coming through, more than a decade after the Reform era. Jakarta now has a total fertility rate of 2.1 children per family, down from 2.2 in 2002.
Wiwi said despite the campaign being less intense, people still had contraception at the forefront of their mind.
"People still remember the campaigns and slogans from the 1980s and 1990s. However, if we don't reinforce the message, people will start to forget about it," Tuty said.
She said the 2.1 fertility rate meant the average family in Jakarta had two children, with a few having three.
"But in reality, some family only have one child, others might not have any, and other families will have three to four," she said. She once met a woman with 16 children in East Jakarta.
"It's not that I want to prevent women from having children. But, by having less, we can raise their quality of life and give them a better education," she said.
Jakarta has around 1.15 million couples in their reproductive age, 61 percent of whom use contraception. The city has around 8.5 million residents according to data from the Jakarta Population Agency.
The BPMPKB's new campaign will target new couples that were still in primary or secondary school when the 1980s and 1990s campaign was rife, hoping to bring the fertility rate down to 2.0.
Tuty said the challenges for family planning campaign were tough due to the lack of funding, She added the budget currently targeting couples not using contraception was about Rp 7 billion.
"That amount actually only covers 30 percent of the campaign program," Tuty said.
In the absence of a mass media campaign, the BPMPKB is now campaigning and giving contraceptive treatments in subdistricts. Three multi-functional vans travel every day to areas in the city giving out free contraception.
Tuty said this way, they could also reach poor families that could not afford to get contraceptive treatments.
She said newcomers from other cities who were not legal residents of Jakarta could receive free treatment as well.
"Even though they don't have a Jakarta ID, they live here. If we don't address family planning within their communities, the city will sooner or later face over population as well," she said.
According to author Betsy Hartman in her book Reproductive Rights and Wrong, the Soeharto regime used coercive methods to implement its family planning programs. Reports in the book show the police and the Army intimidated the public into using contraception.
