Women, the State and Reproductive Health Issues in Nigeria

Abstract

The relationship between Nigerian women and the State requires serious thought in all its dimensions. In whatever discipline one is working, a focus on the ‘woman question’ calls for close attention to other issues such as gender relations, ethnicity and religion, since each has an impact on women’s lives, and is mobilized within specific social contexts and historical periods. In this essay, I intend to address the problem of reproduction and reproductive health. Although this appears to be one area in which women have received more attention than men (there are increasing calls to ‘bring men into the picture’), it is clear that a good portion of this attention has not served women well. It is built on existing unfavorable gender relations and helps to perpetuate a range of subordinate relationships between men and women, as well as serve State interests. Even though the international population establishment became more interested in Africa’s population growth rates after the 1960s, and significantly increased pressure for fertility control in the 1970s, Nigeria and other countries resisted advice on policy development until the mid-1980s. Changes in population policies came after the economic recession, which began in the 1970s. In spite of the fact that Nigerian physicians had for a long time been privately concerned about mortality rates and the health of mothers and children, the push from the West to link fertility to national development in Third World nations only made headway as each African nation sank into an economic crisis.