‘That’s what we are doing, creating healthy families’: Stories of mothers and MSI health providers

Contraception saves lives and supports futures

For four years, Norefa has supported families across his island home of Papua New Guinea with contraception. He sees his work as an MSI nurse as lifesaving.

“I see rural communities at all angles – their joys and struggles. Most of the families have five or six children that they can’t afford to feed because they face many pregnancies. Some mothers suffer pregnancy complications like losing blood, haemorrhaging, and can go into shock and die.”

This year, almost 300,000 women will lose their life due to pregnancy or childbirth. 22,000 women will die because of an unsafe abortion.

Many are from rural, low-income communities typically out of reach of public health support, and without the work of organisations like MSI travelling in to provide services, they often have no access to contraception or adequate maternal healthcare.

“I have seen changes in these communities – people understanding the benefits of our services, children who have grown healthy and well. That’s what we are doing: creating healthy families.”

“We are saving mothers from burying their children, and children from burying their mothers.”

Over the past ten years, we estimate that our global contraceptive, abortion and post-abortion care services have saved the lives of 300,000 women and girls. In the countries where we work, pregnancy-related deaths would be over 15% higher without MSI programmes.

But beyond saving a woman’s life, we must also consider her longer-term health and well-being. The ability to choose when (or if) to have children is one of the most important factors determining a woman’s future path and welfare. A simple contraceptive method can transform a woman’s agency over her body, health and life in a way few other things could.

Two mothers share what spacing their children has meant to them

This is what compelled Choukourya to seek contraception immediately after having her first child, so she could space out her pregnancies and look after her own health and that of her child.

“MSI staff came to provide us with information, and it made sense to me. There is a two-and-a-half-year gap between my daughter and my son.”

“These child-spacing methods are really helping us.”

Around 6000 kilometres away in Afghanistan, Ferhana is a mother with a similar point of view.

She uses a long-acting method of contraception to control when she gets pregnant. She sees that it gives her more opportunities for taking care of herself and contributing to her society. She is free to pursue her art, which brings her joy.

For Ferhana, she turned to MSI’s contraceptive services to help her manage her children, their education, hygiene and health. She feels it has helped her to such an extent that she now tells women in her community to visit our clinic to discuss their options.

Everyone deserves to have a healthy family and a hopeful future.

That’s what MSI teams, working in some of the poorest, most remote or fragile humanitarian settings across the globe, are in pursuit of every day.

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Our MSI community share about healthy families

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