Indians accept value of family planning

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33254, 18 June 1973, Page 6

Indians accept value of family planning

7///omen’s 17 news

Indian women are realising more and more the value of family planning, Mrs K. G. Koshi said in Christchurch yesterday.

“Wherever you go in India you see on the walls, in theatres — everywhere — a poster showing a mother and father and two children. “In our hospital we try to persuade women coming in for the birth of their third child to have the sterilisation operation and many do.” LEPROSY CENTRE

Mrs Koshi is the wife of the director of the Christian Medical Centre, Vellore, South India, where she works as an administrator in the leprosy rehabilitation centre. The 1170-bed hospital is inter-denominational and international and also includes a medical college. The leprosy rehabilitation centre was started in 1951 by Dr Paul Brand, a British orthopedic surgeon, to “provide care for the patients’ physical needs, bring back their confidence of life and show them the dignity of labour,” said Mrs Koshi.

“The centre caters for men from 14 to 30 who have a disability or a deformity from the disease. Our main aim is to teach them a trade which they can work at in spite of their disability.” More than 200 patients from the centre are employed in industry outside the hospital or have returned to their villages equipped with new knowledge of agricultural methods. CO-OPERATION

The centre works with both the American and British leprosy missions and with the Indian Government control programmes. India’s total number of leprosy patients is about two million, said Mrs Koshi. but they are in pockets all over the country.

The hospital also carries out rehabilitation work among paraplegics. “The head of the physical medicine rehabilitation programme is a woman doctor who is also a paraplegic. She is head of the institution where the physically handicapped train in small vocational programmes.” These programmes are geared to research to help

the village paraplegics adapt. Work within the villages iis done by the hospital’s team of mobile dispensaries, pub|lic health nurses and eye hospitals which work in cooperation with the public (health doctors. IN VILLAGES It is in the village where ;the extensive work must be i done on educating the ; women to family planning, according to Mrs Koshi. “Village women are more conservative. We have a health education programme and family planning field workers who work with the public health nurses. The first hurdle is to get the women to accept the idea and then teach them the methods. More and more women, however, are realising the worth of family planning.” Abortion in India is legal if there is danger to the physical or social life of the mother.

Mrs Koshi is in New Zealand with her husband on a lecture tour and to meet representatives of the “Friends of Vellore” organisation.