ACCORDING to a national daily report, although Bangladesh’s progress in family planning had been impressive over the last two decades, it has been almost stagnant for the last four years due to the fact that women were slow at adopting long-term and permanent contraceptive methods to control further growth of population as said by the experts at the International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP) that began on January 25 at the Bali Nusa Dua Convention Centre in Indonesia.
Last in 2013, the government launched a three-year (2014-2016) countrywide National Family Planning Campaign with a view to promote modern contraceptive methods among the younger generation and meet the family planning and reproductive health needs of females aged between 15 and 24. It shows that there is no FP project of government in these four years which is responsible for the stagnation of family planning progress. Effective and continual FP projects may assist in controlling population growth rate and increase the fertility rate of the population.
An official report says that the total fertility rate (TFR) has been stagnant at 2.3, meaning each adult woman has on average 2.3 children, for the last four years. The TFR declined to 2.3 in 2011 from 6.3 in 1975. In 1975, when the first national survey was conducted, 8% of married women of reproductive age were practicing contraception. A study says that use of contraceptives and quality family planning services can avert more than 32% of maternal deaths and 10% of child mortality if couples spaced their pregnancies more than two years apart. Despite the family planning program’s great success, there are concerns that its expansion to meet the needs of a growing population and to raise contraceptive prevalence may entail unacceptably high costs in the government home service delivery program. At the same time, that growth has undoubtedly also contributed to the proportionate decline in the use of long-acting and permanent methods and to the lack of use of clinics.
Despite all the carelessness, the high contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR) for all methods has increased from 7.7% in 1975 to 62.4% in 2014 and the prevalence of modern contraceptive rate accounts for 54.1% of the total CPR. The CPR for modern methods has increased due to the availability and accessibility of a choice of temporary, long acting and permanent, modern methods in the basket of contraceptives, a so-called ‘cafeteria approach’. Now for the improvement of the approach, it needs to bring changes in both the clinic and the home service delivery programs. Together with the government’s effective policy-initiative, engaging media and civil society and religious community leaders will be crucial for the successful use of contraceptive method with a view to controlling population growth.
