We can thus expect a different Indonesia, a different level of family prosperity and a higher possibility for the younger generations to achieve sustainable development in the future.

As Indonesia has gone through a “golden era” of family planning in the 1990s, but then fell into stagnation for two decades, now is the time to reposition family planning as an investment in women as valuable human resources in the nation’s development.

To plan a family is as difficult as to plan other important things in life. Very few Indonesian families make good plans. Most people do not plan anything: no plan for starting a savings account to pay children’s college fees, no plan for paying health insurance in case one day a catastrophic illness strikes and even no plan about what age to first have sex, or have a first pregnancy, or a first birth.

As much as women should thank the BKKBN, the family planning program under the BKKBN should also thank Indonesian women for their support that made this program attain a TFR of 2.4, similar to the achievement attained by neighboring countries in Southeast Asia.

In comparison, we saw no success in BKKBN’s attempts to target men; as a result, the use of male condoms and vasectomy rates remain very low. For more than 30 years, women participated in the family planning program obediently, which ended up in twice the female contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR) in this country compared to male CPR.

There was no extra effort to promote women’s human rights in our family planning program, as if women thought contraceptive pills and injectables had given them the freedom to choose if and when they want to become pregnant. Without access to family planning, unplanned or unintended pregnancies often occur.

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