According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), reproductive health means a total well-being in all aspects of reproduction, i.e., physical, emotional, behavioural and social. Therefore, a society with people having physically and functionally normal reproductive organs and normal emotional and behavioural interactions among them in all sex-related aspects might be called reproductively healthy.
India was amongst the first countries in the world to initiate action plans and programmes at a national level to attain total reproductive health as a social goal.
These programmes called ‘family planning’ were initiated in 1951 and were periodically assessed over the past decades.
Improved programmes covering wider reproduction-related areas are currently in operation under the popular name ‘Reproductive and Child Health Care (RCH) programmes’.
The world population which was around 2 billion (2000 million) in 1900 rocketed to about 6 billion by 2000 and 7.2 billion in 2011.
An exponential rise in the population from the time of independence until May 2011 was contributed to factors such as rapid decline in the death rate, infant mortality rate (IMR), maternal mortality rate (MMR) and a sharp rise in the reproducible age are deemed to the contributing factors.
The RCH (Reproductive Child Health) programme was effective only marginally to bring down the population growth rate.
The government was forced to take up stern measures as a result of alarming growth rate leading to scarcity of basic requirements.
The measures to check the population growth rate most importantly is encouraging people to have smaller families through the use of various contraceptives. Some other measures were –
Contraceptive methods have a broad range covering natural/traditional methods (periodic abstinence), IUDs, barriers (diaphragms, condoms, cervical caps, vaults), oral contraceptives (pills), implants, surgical methods (sterilization), injectables and so on.
Intentional or voluntary termination of pregnancy before full term is called medical termination of pregnancy (MTP) or induced abortion.
MTP or induced abortion was legalized in India in 1971 with strict conditions to avoid any misuse. It refers to the voulntary or intentional termination of pregnancy before reaching the full term.
It is considered safe until the first trimester after which increases the chances of being at a riskier place.
Infections or diseases which are transmitted through sexual intercourse are collectively called sexually transmitted infections (STI) or venereal diseases (VD) or reproductive tract infections (RTI).
Gonorrhoea, syphilis, genital herpes, chlamydiasis, genital warts, trichomoniasis, hepatitis-B and of course, the most discussed infection in the recent years, HIV leading to AIDS are some of the common STIs.
Some of these infections like hepatitis–B and HIV can also be transmitted by sharing of injection needles, surgical instruments, etc. with infected persons, transfusion of blood, or from an infected mother to the foetus too.
Except for hepatitis-B, genital herpes and HIV infections, other diseases are completely curable if detected early and treated properly.
A discussion on reproductive health is incomplete without a mention of infertility.
The state of being unable to produce offsprings even after sexual intercourse is referred to as infertility which can be contributed to factors – congenital, physical, drugs, psychological, immunological.
To assist such couples there are specialized techniques – ART (assisted reproductive technologies) which covers IVF (Invitro fertilization) and ET (Embryo transfer).
In vitro fertilisation (IVF–fertilisation outside the body in almost similar conditions as that in the body) followed by embryo transfer (ET) is one of such methods. In this method, popularly known as test tube baby programme, ova from the wife/donor (female) and sperms from the husband/donor (male) are collected and are induced to form zygote under simulated conditions in the laboratory.
(i) Better awareness about sex-related matters.
(ii) Increased number of medically assisted deliveries and better postnatal care leading to decreased maternal and infant mortality rates.
(iii) Increased number of couples with small families.
(iv) Better detection and cure of STDs.
(v) Overall increased medical facilities for all sex-related problems.
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