Men’s Attitudes Towards Family Planning in a Traditional Urban Centre: An Example from Ilorin, Nigeria
R.A.OlawepoandE.A.Okedare
Department of Geography, University of Ilorin, PMB 1515, Ilorin, Nigeria E-mail: ralfabbey@yahoo.com
KEYWORDS Family planning; reproductive health; contraception; attitudes; and acceptability
ABSTRACT This study focused on measuring men’s attitudes towards family planning in a traditional urban set up with peculiarity of varied attributes. About 500 men aged 20 and above were randomly sampled within the traditional wards of Ilorin, Nigeria. The study revealed a lot of divergences as regards family planning among men. The level of awareness is vast among different zones in the city, while the transitional zone recorded a high performance level; the core and traditional zones are least in terms of acceptability. Multiple regressions indicated that the religion of the people, the existing family size and levels of education are the best predictors of the varied pattern of acceptability. Recommendations towards better effectiveness were duly presented.
INTRODUCTION
The issue of family planning all over the World has attracted attentions due to its impor- tance in decision making about population growth and development issues. In this wise, Geo- graphers have become increasingly alarmed by the precipitous rise in its effects on population growth, not only in Nigeria or the United States ofAmerica, but through out the World (Okedare,
2000). The World Health Organisation (1971) defined Family Planning as the practice that helps individuals or couples to attain certain objectives such as avoiding unwanted pregnancies, bring- ing about unwanted babies at the right time, regulating the interval between pregnancies, controlling the time at which birth occurs in relation to the ages of the parents and determining the number of children in the family.
Onokerhoraye (1997) also defined family planning as the provision of birth prevention information services and appliances. It also involves teaching men and women about their bodies and teaching them how to prevent births usually with contraceptives but sometimes also with abortion or sterilization.
Various works and researches have also been done on perceptions and attitudes of people on family planning, but major emphases had always been placed on the role of women and the female gender approaches in many cases. For example, Onokerhoraye (1997: 106, 168) gave detailed analyses of peoples’ perceptions on family planning in Benue state,Nigeria.Healso examined a comparative analysis and peoples’ perspectives on health care facilities. In spite of the intro- duction of family planning services as means of curbing fertility rate, the population still rises because of the attitudes of the people involved. This is noticed especially in men and the role they play in reproduction. Hatcher et al. (1997) opined that family planning is now seen as human right basic to human dignity. People and governments around the world understand this. Their work further showed that family planning helps women protect themselves from unwanted pregnancies. Since the 1960s family planning programmes have helped women around the world avoid about 400 million unwanted pregnancies. As a result, many women’s lives have been saved from high-risk pregnancies and unsafe abortions (Hatcher et al., 1997: 2; Huezo and Carignam, 1997). However, most available works still point to emphasis being placed on the women fold at the detriment of the men counter part.(Olawepo, 2003).In line with the postulates of the Central Place Theory, health and family planning facilities can be conceived as constituting a hierarchical system(Shanmon and Dever,1974; Okafor. 1989: 3) with secondary health and family planning facilities occupying an intermediate position. As it is often assumed in the cultural ethics in Nigeria, a large proportion of the men folks feel less concerned about family planning. However, the emergence of responsible parenthood, and the need to protect men folk’s sexuality have improved this awareness among them. The questions still remain: are the male