Greetings,
I have tried to stay out of this one, and am naturally not
getting involved in debating whether contraception is acceptable to Islam
or not, but I just thought I'd mention one thing regarding contraceptive
use among Gambian women. There seems to be a great deal of emphasis put
here on those women who use contraceptives for various forms of
non-sanctioned sexual activity. Yet, when a major research project was
conducted in Gambia some years ago, it was found (to everyone's surprise!)
that the main reason many Gambian rural women use contraception is to
INCREASE their number of healthy children. Women reported that they know
that they have only a limited number of potential pregnancies allotted to
them over the course of their lifetimes, expressed in Mandinka as
"muscles," faso. In each pregnancy--regardless of its outcome--one muscle
is "spent," kuntu. Now, if many of these pregnancies result in
miscarriage or stillbirth (a tragically frequent outcome, especially among
the extremely poor North Bank women interviewed for this study), muscles
are "wasted" and the total number of living children a woman can have is
reduced. The women who spoke to these researchers explained that their
goal was still to have many healthy children within marriage, but that in
these days when traditions such as post-partum abstinence and prolonged
breastfeeding are eroding, some women have adopted Western contraception
techniques in order to space their births and in the end have MORE
children. Anyone who is interested can read more about this in a paper
called "Reproductive Mishaps and Western Contraception: An African
Challenge to Fertility Theory" by Caroline Bledsoe, Fatoumata Banja and
Allan Hill (in Population and Development Review 24 [1] 1998). Dr.
Bledsoe also has a book coming out soon called (I think) "The Contingent
Lifecourse: African Challenges to the Culture of Western Science" which
tangles with many Western assumptions about "population control."
Finally, I want to stress that I am aware that these are not the ONLY
reasons Gambian (or other) women practice contraception, but I feel that,
in all fairness,this perspective deserves to be heard as well.
Best, Ylva
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