A Midwife is chastising Ghanaian men for sabotaging family planning efforts. Madam Abigail Adjei, who works with the Ankaase Methodist Faith Healing Hospital observes that many women complain about negative repercussions of many of the family planning options.

“Some say they bleed endlessly when they take some of these options, others say they grow very lean, some even say they feel faint or lose consciousness all together”.

The health worker, who also deals with some maternal health organisations, explains that mostly, the only acceptable choice for such women who claim to have experienced some of these symptoms is the calendar-based method.

The calendar method helps you predict your fertile and safe days by tracking the length of your menstrual cycles over several months.

Madam Adjei is unhappy however that, men violate this method of birth control at will. She says, the best thing is to use condoms when the safe period is not yet due. “The men however, refuse to use condoms, are unable to withdraw at the point of ejaculation and hence impregnate the women who have put in great effort at learning this method”, she observed.

She also stated that many of the women sneak to do family planning because their husbands or boyfriends oppose it and sometimes beat them when they discover they have undertaken any of the long term family planning options.

"Most of the time, we chastise the women when they get pregnant out of plan because they are the people we usually have access to but we have realized that the men have been sabotaging their efforts somehow" she revealed.

She suggested that it would be helpful for men and their women to make sexual decisions together and also advised the men to take enough interest in reproductive health to visit the hospital with their wives on issues regarding family planning.

“It will be helpful if the men took time to understand the calendar-based method of family planning so that they are better able to support their women attain whatever family planning goals they have set”, she explained.

“The fact is that some of the women don’t even get it right, so it helps if the men also know it and are able to correct them when they err” she offered.