A young activist attends the Climate March 2019, in Karachi. Family planning is key to a sustainable future. — Photo by author Head nurse, Angelina Maqbool, who has been working in the ward since 1994, has seen it all — 24th pregnancy, miscarriages, abortions, complications, just about anything that happens in an OB-GYN ward. And she is not too impressed with Pakistani husbands. "They are incorrigible! We rejoice the day when a husband comes and asks us first about how his wife is doing soon after delivering the baby, instead of how the baby is or the sex of the baby; but those days are very rare here," she says. The point is, says the nurse, the woman's health is inconsequential.
"If it were important, would they not agree to adopt some FP method?" she asks and adds, "For these men, a woman is just a toy, for his pleasure, who cares what she's going through," she retorts angrily.
This lackadaisical attitude towards a woman's well being is also having disastrous consequences — a runway population in a resource stretched country like Pakistan. With a population that has crossed 208 million and growing at a high rate of 2.4%, and at sixth position globally, demographers worry if things remain the same, it will soon become the fifth most populous country of the world.
Editorial: 217m and counting
Currently, Indonesia, the US, India and China have higher populations than Pakistan. Unless concrete steps are taken to halt this trend, the country’s population could exceed 300m by 2050, warns a UN report this year.
Therefore, despite 64% of Pakistan's population under the age of 30 and which could have been a demographic dividend for the country; people's misplaced attitude towards FP, a lack of counselling towards its use coupled with non-availability of the contraception of choice and further aggravated by the bad rap the latter continue to carry, it is turning into a demographic disaster.
Uneducated, unskilled, stunted (four in 10 under-five children are stunted according to the new National Nutrition Survey 2018 while 17.7% suffer from wasting), the next generation will become a huge burden on the state already reeling from climate-induced shocks — food, water and energy shortages along with declining employment opportunities.
The World Bank, terming under-nutrition as world's most "serious but least addressed development challenges", looks at it through the lens of "lost national productivity" and calculates this loss to be anywhere from 2% to 3% of GDP in some countries and up to 11% of GDP in Africa and Asia each year.
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