Lets Reach Everyone with Accessible, Friendly Family Planning and sexuality-education
What does your email support mean?
Emailing your support means that:
1. You agree that getting family planning assistance, including safe sex, to all South Africans, however distant and however disadvantaged, is an urgent priority.
2. You agree that getting good information to all young people - whether they are at school or not and helping them to form realistic plans about their sex lives - is of critical importance if South Africa is to avoid AIDS, STDs, abortions, and unwanted, unplanned babies.
Imagine a South Africa that Works
Our message is very, very simple: Why not get a universal voluntary family planning programme going in all of South and Southern Africa? "Universal" simply means that you leave out no one at all. It- will cost more to reach those people who live in isolated, distant areas, but that should not be a consideration.
Half the babies born or aborted in South Africa are not wanted. Our aim is to reach these unwilling mothers. We aim to interest people whose concerns are in different areas, e.g.
Lovers of the Land
Let's co-opt them all
There is a killer disease out there
The estimates currently being published in the newspapers are a year old, because they are referring to data collected a year ago and not published until now. On Wednesday 30 October 1996, AIDS expert Dr Clive Evian gave me these figures:
The number of South Africans who are HIV+ is close to three million.
11 % to 12% of all South African teenage girls are HIV+. The AIDS epidemic is growing more quickly in South Africa than in any other nation in the world.
Handing out condoms to young people has not been successful because they are not being used consistently in that age group.
The Health Department is now recommending that young people postpone full sexual activity.
In classrooms and youth clubs around the country young people themselves are coming to the same conclusion. By seeing that there are older facilitators spending time with them every week we can speed up the revolution which will inevitably occur when South Africans start dying in large numbers from AIDS.
Other Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs)
The number of these diseases is increasing all the time. Some of them can be easily cured. Others require up-to-date information, because different STD’s may need different antibiotics.
Save Yourself
Save the Nation
Save the Planet
Safe sex saves lives - abstain, be faithful or a use a condom
Professor Dennis Davey, Cape Town gynaecologist, said in an address to the Planned Parenthood Association in 1991:
1 am concerned about the future - the future our children will grow up in and the future our children's children will live to see. 1 would like to see plans not only for today and the next decade but for the generations yet to come.
1 share the view of C. P. Snow that 'the world's greatest need is an appetite for the future', that 'all healthy populations are ready to sacrifice the existential moment, for their children's future and for the children after these' and that 'a sense of the future is behind all good policies and unless we have it we can give nothing either wise or decent to the world'.
'To cause the existence of another human being, to conceive and give birth, should be regarded as a unique privilege to be exercised with greatest responsibility and care.' Professor Dennis Davey
1. Ubuntu means 'the preservation and stability of the whole.
2. Put the good of the whole above the good of the individual.
3. Neither man nor woman is an island. Individuals cannot exist outside the rules of communities.
Suggested ways of helping our Nation, our Children, Ourselves
1. Start sex late. It is worth waiting for. Avoid disease, pressure, fear Join with others who have made this decision.
2. Late first child. Most South Africans are between 10 and 25. If many people in this group have their first child later than is now usually the case - this would help the nation catch up and reach the goal of gradually eliminating poverty.
3. Stop at two.
4. Appropriate abstention: this is worth learning, as it is needed at all stages of life.
'Those first years are basic. Every study of child (or ape) psychology confirms that the more attention and security the young are given in the beginning, the less clinging and dependent they will be when they grow older, and the more successfully they will respond to later crises and challenges. If they do not hear language spoken in their first years, they will never learn to speak it properly. If they are given nothing for their minds to work on then, that deficit cannot be made up later. If they do not experience love and trust then, later in life they may have none to give.'
Elaine Morgan The Descent of the Child Penguin 1996, pp. 18011
Quote
On pp. 23415 of the Bloomsbury edition of Emotional Intelligence (1996) the author, Daniel Goleman, quotes Urie Bronfenbrenner as saying: 'In the absence of good support systems, external stresses have become so great that even strong families are failing apart. The hecticness, instability and inconsistency of daily family life are rampant in all segments of our society… We are depriving millions of children of their competence and moral character.
Goleman goes on to write of 'the erosion of the countless small, nourishing exchanges between parent and child that build emotional competences.'
SLEEPERS WAKE
FULL HUMAN INTELLIGENCE
NEEDED
RESPECT LIMITS
RESA is a branch of the SAPLER Population Trust. SAPLER is a non-governmental, non-religious organisation set up to highlight the suffering caused by rapid population growth and to examine the sensitivities surrounding the issue.
We looked at what other nations were doing to solve the problem, what our own government population programme was doing and what possible answers there were.
We came more and more to focus on the unmet need for family planning, because it is deeply ironic to focus on population issues in general when individual women are not being reached with good family planning and individual teenagers are not being assisted in making sensible plans for their sex lives.
Key words in our campaign became 'universal' and 'soon' because we cannot afford to wait until comprehensive health services reach absolutely everyone.
So our mission is no longer just information and advocacy but is now a clearly implemented strategy to see that cost-effective and workable plans are everywhere in place. To do this will cost millions - but will save billions.
The idea of RESA comes from the research documented in the SAPLER Survey of Unmet Needs for Family Planning (SANFI GOLDFIELDS).
The project has the support of the SA Department of Health.
'Nompilo' means 'l give you love, health and care. 'It was first used by Marina Clarke's health education workers around Middelburg in the Transvaal. Nompilos were rural women who were taught to do simple health tasks for their communities.
One of the tasks done by Marina's nompilos was to bring women who wanted to use contraception to the right place on the right day when the health mobile would be there.
SAPLER started a similar scheme in Winterveld, but concentrating on sexual health and the prevention of unwanted babies. Many women liked the idea of using contraception, but if they lived far from the clinic, various factors got in the way: tiredness, uncertainty, no money for the two or three taxis which would be needed to get to the clinic, fear of what the men would say etc.
All these problems are overcom6 when a mobile, staffed by cheerful and relaxed workers, GOES TO THE VILLAGE. Even the men get used to the idea - and if they do not then special meetings are held to put the issues to them. A SAPLER-nompilo gives love, health, care and information.
2. Sterilizations and Vasectomies
We have found a great interest in these among all sectors of the community. They are supposed to be available as a free service by the state. However, our survey found this not to be true.
One of RESA's goals will therefore be to encourage the state to provide these services at absolutely every hospital and clinic which has small theatre facilities. The mini-lap sterilization can be done by any doctors who are trained to do it. It does. not require the expert training and supervision required for the laparoscopy, which is high-tech, and requires social training and constant practice if it is to be safe.
3. Hospital and Clinic Liaison Workers
Our survey showed that very few South African hospitals give good family planning information to women who go for ante-natal help. Even fewer hospitals follow up the women who want to plan their families to see that the necessary services will be properly provided.
Every ten to twenty young teenagers in our country can be provided with older young volunteers to counsel them. SAPLER has already started doing this.
We call our youth workers
'SAPLER PIONEERS'
We have not come across any young people who are not interested in the population limitation issue as well as the sexual health issue. Names of possible Donors and Helpers
The time has come for each citizen of the planet to play a part in saving it.
Firstly let us see that no unwanted children are born - and then let us see that all our wanted children are free from ignorance of ecology and economics, so that they will willingly limit their own children to the carrying capacity of this part of the planet.
SAPLER stands for: Splendidly Alive People within Limited Environmental Resources
Empower individuals to look at the needs of themselves, their communities and the planet.
February 1997, Published by SAPLER, Johannesburg
1. If you wish to join the SAPLER Population Trust for 1999, and receive past newsletters, please send cheque/postal order for R35 to 'SAPLER'.
2. If you wish to donate to the RESA project please send cheque/ postal order to 'SAPLER/RESA'
3. If you would like to become a founder five-year donor of the project, please send a cheque for R100 for 1999 and enclose a note saying you will contribute R 100 a year for the following four years.
SAPLER Population Trust
PO Box 51446
RAEDENE
2124 Johannesburg
South Africa
Trust Registration: 2190192 Fund Raising: 01 100991 0001
Telephone and Fax (611)640-7180
Trustees: Edward Mabunda, Zanele Mfono, Dr Nthato Motlana, Professor Harry Seftei, Ann Weinberg
Honorary Trustees: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Dr John Hanks, Johannes Jordaan, Dr John Ledger, Beryl Unterhalter, Julian Weinberg
Overseas Supporters: Paul and Anne Ehriich, Prue Leith, Norman Myers, Spike Milligan, Frank Talbot, Lord Vemon