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GLOBAL VIEWS
FAMILY PLANNING
Opinion: Sex
is fun. Family planning messaging should be too.
By Ana Karina De
la Vega Millor 08 June 2017
DKT Mexico
promoting family planning at the Vive Latino national music festival in Mexico
City. Photo by: DKT Mexico
When I was
23 and unmarried, I got pregnant. I was using the rhythm method and condoms, as
I had been told, incorrectly, that intrauterine devices and oral contraceptives
would adversely affect my fertility. My partner and I wanted to pursue our
careers. Parenthood was not in our plans at that time.
Once we
decided not to have the baby, I visited four doctors, where I got no support or
sympathy but received very rude treatment, as if I were a delinquent. My
abortion was underground, expensive and unsafe.
After that
experience, I decided to use a modern contraceptive, but since no doctor was
prepared to counsel me, I used them all in the subsequent six years —
injections, oral contraceptives, implants, emergency contraception and an IUD.
My situation
is unfortunately not unusual, even today, for women in my native Mexico;
unplanned pregnancy is a big problem in Latin America and the Caribbean. The
poor quality of reproductive health care and lack of information available to
adolescents in Mexico leaves a lot of unanswered questions, as this study shows.
Almost
three-quarters of pregnancies among adolescents aged 15-19 in my region are
unplanned, according to the Guttmacher Institute, and about half of
those end in abortion. Among all women aged 15-19 who need contraceptives, 36
percent of them are not using a modern method. Unmet need is highest in Central
America, where 46 percent of sexually active adolescents who want to avoid
pregnancy are not using modern contraceptives.
So in 2015,
as the director of DKT
Mexico, a nongovernmental organization that uses social marketing to
prevent HIV and promote contraceptives in Latin America and the Caribbean, my
colleagues and I set about to change this paradigm in Mexico.
We launched
a traditional family planning campaign that took a formal, medicalized approach
that educated young people on the contraceptive methods available. We spoke a
lot about the myths of various contraceptive methods. We were a bit preachy.
This
campaign did not achieve the results we had hoped. Few young people attended
our talks, visited the website or engaged with our social media. Even when
there was engagement, these more clinical messages did not resonate. Thus, the
anemic communication translated into anemic contraceptive sales.
Alternatively,
we launched a highly successful Prudence condom brand campaign with
well-attended events, a Facebook page with 800,000 followers and a Twitter account with
47,000 followers. Everything we did was imbued with fun and showmanship. Our
condom sales tripled from 15 million in 2012 to 45 million in 2016.
Our
experiences with the two diverse campaigns taught us four important lessons
about effectively promoting contraceptives to young people:
1. Be fun
and not boring.
2. Focus on
the benefits of using contraception. Stop talking about the myths of
contraception. That just reinforces the myths.
3. Talk
about “unplanned pregnancies” not “unwanted pregnancies.” Most people in Mexico
think of babies as blessings from God, and not “unwanted.”
4. Talk
about “life planning” not “family planning.” Adolescents and young adults do
not think in terms of family planning but are interested in not interrupting
their education, travel and careers.
In short: We
stopped being preachy and started being fun. What worked was adopting similar
entertaining messages and approaches we were already using to market the
Prudence condoms.
We created
“Planficame Esta,” or “Plan me this,” a lively digital platform with a website, and a
presence on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
These tools offer exciting and colorful messages about the importance of having
a life plan and avoiding pregnancy until you are ready. There are plenty of
ribald jokes, frank discussions and flirty talk full of double-entendres that
are appealing to young people. Our Facebook page now has more than 1.2 million
followers.
DKT International’s
founder wrote that two of the institutional obstacles to
advances in family planning are overmedicalization of family planning and fear
of sex. In Mexico, we have overcome both hindrances. Our main message has
become “Have sex, have fun, but use double protection against a
sexually-transmitted disease or an unplanned pregnancy that will change the
course of your life.”
But it’s not
enough to have fun messaging; it’s imperative that young people who are
motivated to use contraception are connected to welcoming clinics that offer
appropriate products and services. In our case, we created a network of
youth-friendly clinics called RED DKT to improve sexual and reproductive health and
encourage greater use of long-acting reversible contraception such as IUDs.
DKT began
this work in Mexico but we have have now expanded into Guatemala, the Dominican
Republic, El Salvador and Venezuela. In 2017, we plan to expand into Colombia,
Costa Rica, Cuba, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama and Puerto Rico.
The result
is that more young people are reading our websites and social media platforms,
sharing information with their friends and coming to our events and clinics.
More importantly, they are converting that knowledge to better health behavior
— using contraception to avoid unplanned pregnancy and STDs. Our couples’ “year
of protection” — the amount of contraception to protect a couple for one year —
have more than doubled between 2014 and 2016.
The bottom
line is that fewer girls and young women will be forced to go through what I
did. And that is why I am so passionate about this work.''
Africa Center for Clin Gov Research &
Patient Safety
@ HRI West Africa
Group - HRI WA
Consultants in
Clinical Governance Implementation
Publisher: Health and
Medical Journals
8 Amaku Street Housing
Estate, Calabar
Cross River State, Nigeria
Cross River State, Nigeria
Phone No. +234 (0) 8063600642
Joseph Ana has a cumulative continuous practice experience of over 40-years in
Nigeria, United Kingdom and Ghana as a Primary Health Care Physician, Public
Health Expert, General and Urological Surgeon, Health Policy Expert and
Implementer, Medical Educator and Trainer..
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