Muhammad Garba
Saratu Sale, a young mother of seven children from Balagu village, Kiyawa local government of Jigawa state has joined the campaign for promoting family planning in her community for better reproductive health.
Saratu gave birth to her seventh child two months ago and spoke to Stallion Times when she visited Balagu Clinic to access family planning services.
She said she was at the facility to access the fourth round of child spacing services.
The mother of seven explained that she began to adopt child spacing after giving birth to her third child, and now she has seven children.
“I have been using the family planning method and it helps me and my children to grow well and above all I continue to give birth at the right time without having any challenges.
“This baby is my number seventh child, so family planning can’t stop women from giving birth in general, but it helps women to give birth at the right time according to the medical advice.
“In my community, I serve as an exemplary family planning model. I advocated it to many of my community members and a sizeable number accepted and adopted it as they saw me and my children healthy and hearty because of the child spacing.”
However, Saratu stated that she can’t say whether she will go for another pregnancy or not.
She also maintained that it is an issue of discussion between her and her husband which will be bound upon time and condition.
On her part, the Head of the Antenatal Care Unit and Family planning desk officer of Balagu Primary Healthcare facility, Mrs. Hauwa Hamisu Musa testified that Saratu has been accessing the service according to the record and also became an advocate of the service.
“Hauwa brought many childbearing age women to access the family planning or child spacing services after she engaged them on its advantage to family reproductive health.
As people like Saratu serve as exemplary models in the community, the public is becoming enlightened on the advantages of family planning and also clearing the misconceptions about it.
“The acceptability and accessibility of the services keep increasing, we hardly recorded 30-40 women accessing the service in a month but now we used to have 200 to above monthly,” Hauwa stated.
She then called on the government and partners to strengthen the supply of the family commodities as many of the facilities used to go out of stock due to the growing demands in the state.
