Family planning takes root in remote areas
Hoàng Thị Mọn has been providing family planning advice for the residents of Bắc Lanh Chang Village for more than two decades. For 20 of the 22 years that Mọn has been on the job in the northern province of Bắc Kạn, none of the couples in her commune, most of them members of the Tày ethnic minority, have given birth to a third child.Mọn often needs to mobilise all her patience and understanding to get results. There were times when it took her a whole month to persuade a husband to agree for his wife to get sterilised, only to nearly be thwarted when the day of the procedure arrived. “He said he would not stay at home and watch their children while his wife went to a reproductive health centre to get sterilised,” she said. “The wife had to bring the children along, and I had to be a babysitter-cum-caregiver who took care of both her and her kids.”
