Govt to promote sterilization in family planning

JAKARTA (JP): The government plans to embark on a campaign to promote sterilization as an effective and safe method of preventing unwanted pregnancy, a senior official of the National Family Planning Board said on Saturday.

The board is currently working on preparing the campaign in cooperation with the Indonesian Medical Association, the board's deputy chairman Pieter H. Sumbung said.

Despite its advantages over most other forms of contraception, sterilization -- in the form of vasectomies for husbands and tubectomies for wives -- has not yet gained the popularity which it is capable of gaining in Indonesia, chiefly because the government has not promoted it hard enough, Sumbung said during a seminar on sterilization as an effective family planning method.

The one-day seminar was organized by the medical association.

"Compared with other family planning methods, sterilization is more effective, safer and cheaper," Sumbung said.

The promotion of sterilization will be chiefly handled by doctors, hospitals and clinics, who will provide information as well as sterilization facilities, he added.

Sumbung, who is also chairman of the Association of the Indonesian Christian Intelligentsia, said sterilization, allowing couples to avoid pregnancy without affecting their sexual activities, has not been widely promoted by the government because of some opposition from the Catholic and Moslem communities in the country.

"If sterilization can be accepted by all religious groups, it will not be difficult to launch the national campaign," he said.

Medical association chairman Azrul Azwar told the seminar, which was attended by about 100 doctors and paramedics, that many couples still associate sterilization with impotence and infertility.

"This is where medical and health officers come in; namely, to provide true and accurate information about vasectomy and tubectomy," he said.

Modern medical technology has been able to help sterilized couples have children if they wanted to, he added. Many couples in Indonesia successfully conceived children again after being sterilized for years, he said.

In the few cases in which women could not conceive, that had been largely due to their being too old and had nothing to do with sterilization, he added.

"Sterilization is just a surgical procedure to prevent a female from becoming pregnant or a male from fathering a child," he said, adding that sterilization could be reversed using modern medical technology.

Azrul said sterilization is more effective than the other family planning methods, such as the pill, injections and intra- uterine devices (IUDs), in preventing pregnancies because almost 100 percent of surgical procedures for vasectomy and tubectomy were successful.

"Besides having no side-effects, like those posed by drug pills and injections, sterilization does not affect couples' sexual intimacy," he said.

According to a Family Planning Board survey conducted in March 1995, 1.33 million couples, or 5.8 percent of the 22.83 million couples who practice family planning in Indonesia, have opted for sterilization.

The study showed that the pill is still the most popular contraceptive, with 31.4 percent of the total, followed by injections (31 percent), IUDs (22.2 percent) and implants (eight percent). (rms)