Oro! Oro! Oro! thank you Marie Stopes for visiting this part of the province,” Lianne chanted in her local vernacular.
The mother from Aba village in Oro’s Tamata LLG was ecstatic to access family planning services after having 13 children with her husband Ben.
Lianne’s story represents that of so many rural women, men, youths, and adolescents who are faced with limited or no access to contraceptives resulting in unplanned pregnancies and the high maternal mortality rates in the country.
“I was using herbs to assist my husband and I control and space our children, but that did not work,” she says.
The nearest health facility is Manau Health Centre, however there are no family planning or reproductive health service providers on-site, so women in the area often have many children close together.
This is a worry for women like Lianne because of the physical demands of birthing all the children and the difficult realities of providing for them.
“My husband and I are subsistence farmers and we do not have any other means of income to support all our children with their basic needs,” Lianne says.
When Lianne and Ben heard that Marie Stopes outreach team in Lae would be visiting their village, they knew they had the opportunity to seek help to not have any more children.
Marie Stopes rural multi-day outreach programs are supported through the PNG-Australia Partnership to provide family planning services to remote areas.
From January to June this year, Marie Stopes have reached over twenty-thousand people, offering a wide range of short-term, long-term and permanent methods of contraception to help prevent or space pregnancies. They have also reached over 350,000 people through the distribution of information education and communication materials.
The outreach team were stationed at the elementary school in Aba village and used an open-air classroom to deliver family planning services to the villagers.
“We walked for one and a half hours to this village for me to get this implant,” says Lianne.
“We were very happy that the Marie Stopes PNG team visited our village to provide family planning service in our area.”
The implant is one of the family planning methods that helps to prevent pregnancy for 3-5 years and can be removed at any time.
The contraceptive takes about five minutes to implant in the upper arm and is nearly 100 per cent effective in preventing unwanted pregnancies.
It is one of the family planning methods Marie Stopes offers that empowers women and families to make informed decisions about when and how many children they want to have.
