This month, FIGO celebrates sixty-five years as a federation committed to enhancing the fitness and well being of every female international.
Professor Mahmoud F. Fathalla, FIGO Past President 1994-1997, has spent his career documenting, discovering and advocating for ladies’ fitness and rights. Here, he displays at the modifications, demanding situations and vision for FIGO’s future.
“Across the many years of my career, I have seen how global processes to vital issues of women’s fitness – especially reproductive fitness and desire – have modified.
The first United Nations International Conference on Population (ICPD), convened in Bucharest in 1974, upheld the slogan that own family making plans is the answer. Ten years later, the second ICPD in Mexico City put forward that development is the solution, improvement is the satisfactory contraceptive tablet. The 0.33 convention, in Cairo in 1994, after I have become president of FIGO, acknowledged these and extra. It upheld the significance of own family planning, the importance of development, but affirmed a greater reality: girls are the solution.
My technology of ladies’ fitness professionals has been fortunate to witness how ladies the world over, empowered by means of family planning, were capable of adjusting and control their fertility, broadening their lifestyles selections and pursuing an efficient and no longer simplest a reproductive career. So whilst issues about population growth are raised, FIGO has a critical function to play in explaining that in spite of all the rhetoric, women in many nations round the arena still have a huge unmet need for family planning.
Women additionally have a need to secure abortion. Millions of ladies around the world hazard their lives and fitness to quit an undesirable being pregnant, however, the controversy surrounding it tends to difficult to understand its size as fitness trouble. Laws that allow legal termination of pregnancy only whilst the existence of the mom is in threat satirically put the life of the mother in danger. Unsafe abortion is one of the great omitted troubles of fitness care and a critical challenge to women all through their reproductive lives.
“Mothers aren’t death due to illnesses we can not save you or deal with. They are still demise due to the fact societies have not begun to make the selection that their lives are well worth saving.” I made this remark many years in the past, and unluckily it remains an obvious, inconvenient fact. Progress has been made and needs to be applauded, however in many countries, maternal deaths are nevertheless a major fitness scandal. Mothers are left to die task the risky method of giving us a brand new lifestyles; to die whilst their lives may be saved.
As the Nairobi Summit on ICPD25 techniques, my message could be: take care of girls’ fitness and rights, and the ‘populace problem’ will contend with itself.
If the sector needed proof about the health hazards for girls denied equality and empowerment, the AIDS pandemic provided a tough lesson. What began as a by and the large male epidemic has now left ladies, specifically young women, greater inclined.
Women do no want “large brother” to dictate choices for them approximately what to do with their own bodies. They may be trusted to make knowledgeable choices approximately their reproductive fitness, and their choices should be respected and applied. It should be a duty of the entire worldwide community to make certain that ladies, wherever they’re, are given a choice of their lives and are given the means to implement their preference.
This is where our FIGO stands.
Our career is greater than a medical technical strong point, most effective to supply infants and connect pelvic organ ailment. We see first-hand how women’s health is frequently compromised, now not because of loss of clinical understanding, however, due to infringement on women’s human rights. As we mark 65 years of FIGO’s paintings to enhance the well being of all women, we renew our commitment to a destiny in which every female is empowered to obtain lively participation in her own health and rights.
