Tamara Congdon 17409414

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Contraceptive pills should be available to all Ghanaian women

Resubmission of Anthropology Essay

17 October 2012

Tamara CONGDON
Student ID: 17409414
La Trobe University
ANT1FET Our Global Village: Introduction to Anthropology
Lecturer: Helen Lee
Tutor: Ashley Greenwood

Things I changed in this essay:

I restructured all of the essay to improve value and understanding

I created a strong argument that is present all the way through
I researched more and thus was able to view my point more effectively
I changed my layout of essay
I revised and improved my Harvard referencing

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Contraceptive pills should be available to all Ghanaian women

If you give birth to six or seven children and they start crying
from hunger, and you do not have anything to eat, what will
you do? And If the child goes to the father and says (s)he is
hungry he will say go to your mother. [I say] Which part of
my body do you want me to cut and cook for the child?
Ghanaian women (Schuler 1999,
p 148)

Contraception should be accessible to all Ghanaian women. Contraception relates to

methods that are used to avoid pregnancy. Because the author will mainly be discussing female
contraception, the method that is used is contraceptive pills. Contraception has been available in
Ghana since the 1950s but was only made available to wealthy married couples who did not
necessarily need it. There will be discussion of why some women avoid pregnancy and go to extreme
measures to avoid having a child, including unsafe abortion. Additionally, there will be information on
mens perceptions of childbearing and relate this to why they want a big family. There will be an
analysis on a current program involving family planning and what can be improved to obtain full
access to all women in Ghana.
The main reason that pregnancy is undesired among a lot of Ghanaian women is due to
issues they cannot control. One of them includes low economic status (Oppong & Bleek 1982;
Schuler 1999). Families do not have enough money to keep feeding their children, and this may result
in child mortality (Schuler 1999; Adongo at el. 1997). A Ghanaian woman explained this by saying
that she had to listen to the starving cries of her children when she could not do anything to help
them (Schuler 1999). And Adongo et al. (1997) backed this up by stating that because child mortality
is so high, this discourages parents from having families (Adongo et al. 1997). Oppong and Bleek
(1982) first stated that the three main reasons to abort a child is economic status, social status and
continuing of education, then a couple of years later, Bleek (1990) also states that in order to be in a
high social position in Ghana, women need to have good education and a good marriage (Oppong &
Bleek 1982; Bleek 1990, p. 123). However, in 2011, anthropologist, Nicole Webster (2011) claimed
that the main reason Ghanaian women do not want a mans child is because she had no control over
the sexual encounter (Webster 2011). She further states that despite recent rules of womens rights

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and sexual reproductive rights, Ghanaian women nowadays still do not have a say in their sexual lives
(Webster 2011). The author argues that despite the reasons Ghanaian women do not want a
pregnancy, they should have a right to contraception.
Although this is easily said, women usually do not have the freedom to access these pills
because of their husbands or partners. Because Ghana is a patrilineal society, men have more
influence over women in reproductive matters (Ezeh 1993; Schuler 1999; Laurie, DoDoo & Vrushall
2002; Schwandt et al. 2011; Webster 2011). This includes how many children to have and when,
when to cease or continue child bearing, sexual encounters, contraception and abortion (Laurie,
DoDoo & Vrushall 2002). The reason African men generally want a lot of children is because they
enhance a mans status and prestige of their lineage (Isiugo-Abanihe 1994). Other reasons children
are valuable to men are to help them with labour on the farm, care for other children, to carry the
family name and to financial support the family when they grow older (Adongo et al. 1997; IsiugoAbanihe 1994). It was said in Nigeria (an African county right of Ghana) in a 1994 survey, that 97
percent of people said they would pity a childless man, whereas only 90 percent would pity a childless
woman (Isiugo-Abanihe 1994, p. 159). It is thus argued that due to social ego and pressure from
lineage systems (Laurie, DoDoo & Vrushali 2002), Ghanaian men have more reasons for child
bearing than the wife, even if that leads to starvation and child mortality (Adongo et al. 1997; Schuler
1999). If the wife does not want pregnancy, she has to then take the initiative to either prevent
pregnancy or to abort the pregnancy, usually without husband or partner knowing (Schuler 1999;
Schwandt et al. 2011).
Abortion complications form the largest single case of maternal mortality in Ghana
(Geelhoed 2002, cited in Onselen 2011 p. 16). Women participate in unsafe abortions and risk their
lives in order to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. They often involve instrumental interferences,
herbs and other dangerous medicines (Oppong & Bleek 1982). Onselen (2011) explains there are
herbal abortifacients in plant form that are used to induce abortions, which ultimately encourages
menstruation which washes out the fertilised egg (Onselen 2011, p. 15). Complications with induced
abortion can result in being hospitalised with serious health complications, which may lead to
permanent physical impairments, chronic mobility, infertility and psychological damage (Coeytaux
1990 & McLaurin 1991, cited in Webster 2011, p. 2). It is thus to no surprise that the World Health

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Organisation (WHO) claims that treating abortion complications may consume up to 50% of hospital
budgets in the developing world (WHO 1990, cited in Webster 2011, p. 2). In 1985, the Ghanaian
government allowed abortion under specific circumstances - that is in the cases of rape or incest,
defilement of the mentally handicapped, foetal impairment and to save the life or physical/ mental
health of the woman (IRIN, 2007), and by which would be done in government hospitals or clinics by
a qualified person (Webster 2011). Abortions are negatively perceived in Ghana, so the majority of
cases are performed informally under unsafe conditions, and because of this negativity, if
complications do arise, women are reluctant to receive help (Srofenyoh & Coleman 2009). Following
this statement, Schwandt et al. (2011) concluded that in Accra, the main city of Ghana, educated
women will have the knowledge and access to safe abortion services, even though it is not advertised
or easily available despite being legal (Schwandt et al. 2011). Despite this recent finding, Schwandt et
al. (2011) does agree that this may be different in rural settings of Ghana in 2011. These abortions
and complications could have been prevented or reduced if Ghanaian women had access to
contraceptive pills.
Although there have been contraception available for over fifty years, it originally was only
available for married couples, which generally did not want it (Oppong & Bleek 1982). The Navrongo
program, found in 1988, offered education to Ghanaian women about family planning and the use of
contraception (Schuler 1999). Ghanaian women were still afraid to address the issue about
contraception to their husbands, so the program focussed a lot about gender inequality (Schuler
1999). This was done by educating the men as well as women about family planning and benefits of
it. (DeRose & Ezeh 2005; Ezeh 1993; Schuler 1999; Benefo & Pillai 2005). This caused tension and
anxiety among the Ghanaian men and women as the issue with gender relations became questioned
(Bawah et al. 2003). The Ghanaian tradition was that men would pay the brides family bride wealth
and this means she is entitled to carry his children (Bawah et al. 2003; Webster 2011). This program
is beneficial as it educates some of the rural population of Ghana as well, and thus affecting
reproductive attitudes, decrease in family size preference and increases the desire to regulate
childbearing (Benefo & Pillai 2005). This program needs to be enhanced and developed more to
reach the other parts of Ghana that are missing out. Because of this finding, Akafuah and Sossou

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(2008) found that contraceptive use has increased from 5 percent in 1988 to 13 percent in 1998
(Akafuah and Sossou 2008).
In educating the audience of the issues in this essay, the author argues that these matters
should be addressed in relation to contraception. The main problems that are addressed are male
authority over womens reproduction, risks of induced abortion to the woman as prevention was not
an option, programs that are in place for family planning and contraceptives. The author is proving
that men and women of Ghana have different views of childbearing. Men want more children as it is
pressured from society to maintain a good status (Isiugo-Abanihe 1994), whereas the majority of
women argue that they cannot afford more children as they have to be the ones that care for them
and hear their cries of hunger (Schuler 1999). Because of these women not having a choice in their
own reproduction, they have to initiate contraception and abortion often without their husbands
knowing. We need to make these family planning services and contraception available to all
Ghanaian women without the threat of their husbands getting in the way. When contraceptions are
socially acceptable to all Ghanaian women, the rate of mortality from abortions will decrease
dramatically.

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Reference List
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factors constraining
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and Medicine, vol. 45, no. 12, pp. 1789-1804.
Akafuah, R. A., Sossou, M. A. 2008, Attitudes toward and use of knowledge about family
planning among
Ghanaian Men, International Journal of Mens Health, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 109-120.
Bawah A. A., Akweongo P., Simmons R., Phillips J. F. 2003, Womens fears and mens
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Bleek, W 1990, 'Did the Akan resort to abortion in pre-colonial Ghana? Some
Conjectures', Africa: Journal of
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Ghana, Studies in
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Ghana, SAGE journals, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 53-73.

Onselen, S 2011, 'The knowledge of midwives, priestesses and market sellers about
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