KARACHI: Pakistan is still lagging behind its neighbouring countries in successful family planning, population control and reducing maternal and child morbidity rates.

However, it would be unfair to say that there haven’t been any improvements at all, said speakers at a seminar on Tuesday.

They said that even though family planning in the country had been viewed with skepticism, the overall fertility rate of women had declined to 3.6 from almost 6, but it was still in a high range.

The speakers were talking at the department of community health sciences at the Aga Khan University Hospital (AKUH), on the first day of a two-day event titled ‘Advocacy seminar on family planning and reproductive health’.

Experts from Indonesia, India, Nepal and Bangladesh have come to participate in the event which kicked off with a performance by pop music star Shahzad Roy.

Speakers said that despite the decline in maternal and child morbidity, it was still in a high range. Quoting WHO statistics, they said that the infant mortality rate in 2011 was 65.1 deaths per 1,000 live births, as compared to 90 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1999, while the maternal mortality rate stood at 276 deaths per 100,000 women in 2011 as compared to 450 deaths in 1999.

“Most of the improvement took place when policy makers attached family planning to healthy mothers and children,” said Zeba Sathar, country director for Pakistan Population Council (PPC). “Though the campaign ‘Bachay do hi achhay’ was counterproductive, it was the hallmark of ceasing opposition to family planning among the people.”

Prof Dr Anita Zaidi, chairperson for the department of pediatrics and child health at AKUH, said that many mothers in the country were so malnourished that they did not have the ability to nourish a child. She believed that family planning was not only about population control, it was also about wanting healthy mothers and children. She said that the number of children who died in the first year of being born was disturbing enough, and to add to that around two-thirds of them died during the first month of their lives.

“If a mother is malnourished then there are more chances that her baby too would be born with low birth weight (less than 2.5 kilogrammes), highly susceptible to infection and unable to maintain core body temperature,” said Dr Zaidi. “Between 20 to 30 per cent infants in Pakistan’s urban areas are born with low birth weight while it is 40 per cent for rural areas.”

Putting matters into perspective, chief of population and reproductive health programme and associate professor at the AKUH Dr Sarah Saleem said that Pakistan’s population had already crossed 182 million — doubling at least twice since independence. She said that in 1950, Pakistan’s had been the 13th largest population in the world with 37 million people, while by 2007 the population had increased to 164 million, making it the sixth most populous country.— PPI