most women in rural areas are out of stock, a survey done by Reproductive Health Uganda (RHU) revealed.
Medics like Mary Akullu, an enrolled midwife in in Ayer Health Centre in Apac, attests to this.
"We have plenty of pills but women do not want them, some expire in the stores. They want long-term methods," she notes.
Women stealthily resort to abortion - which is illegal - and as such will not question the qualifications of the person carrying it out.
As a lucrative business, quack medics have joined in by charging exorbitantly.
Even if a woman got to know that a certain doctor is a quack, she would not report for fear of being reprimanded.
Teddy Alyano, a nursing officer in charge of the gynaecology and obstetrics unit at Lira Hospital, says they receive at least five women with post-abortion complications every day.
Most of them get complications like fistula, a perforation of the bladder.
Some become barren when the uterus is removed as a result of a poorly executed abortion, while others die.
Women need family planning services to avoid unwanted pregnancies that will lead to abortion or abandoning their children.
According to RHU, about 6,000 Ugandan women die from pregnancy-related complications, and 297,000 women have unsafe induced abortions.
According to the Uganda Demographic health survey 2006, Uganda is among the countries with the highest number of women (41 per cent) who want to space or limit births but are not using family planning. The fertility rate is 6.7 children per woman.
Rural women have about 10 children without proper spacing. The survey found that the women would have loved to have five children if they had access to a preferred family planning method.
The survey adds that in Uganda, only 18 per cent of married women are using a modern family planning method.
In addition to direct consequences like maternal deaths and unsafe abortions, RHU says the shortage of contraceptives undermines Uganda's economic development by preventing the nation from having a youthful population balanced in size versus the working population.
"This was a vital spur to the development of the East Asia economies from low to middle income countries," says Martha Songa, the RHU spokesperson.
Globally, donor resources for reproductive health are reducing yet demand for contraceptives and other reproductive health supplies is rising.
The government of Uganda is dependent on foreign aid for only 32.6 per cent of the total budget but asks for over 85 per cent of costs for reproductive health supplies from donors.
Source: AllAfrica, 21 March 2010 or www.ippf.org
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