guardian.co.uk,
Joanna Moorhead, Wednesday 11 July 2012
Melinda
Gates: 'I'm a Catholic, but women need access to contraceptives' - video
interview Link to this video
The
billionaire philanthropist Melinda Gates, a practising Catholic, has thrown
down the gauntlet to the Vatican and vowed to dedicate the rest of her life to
improving access to contraception across the globe.
Gates, who
with her husband, Bill, the founder of Microsoft, is one of the world's biggest
players on development issues, predicted that women in Africa and Asia would
soon be "voting with their feet", as women in the west have done, and
would ignore the church's ban on artificial birth control.
Gates, who
was a speaker at the London Summit on Family Planning organised by her
foundation in conjunction with the UK government and the United Nations
Population Fund (UNFPA), said that since she announced her new direction a few
weeks ago she had been inundated with messages of support from Catholic women,
including nuns.
"A
church is made up of its members, and one of the things this campaign might do
is help women speak out. I've had thousands of women come on to websites and
say" 'I'm a Catholic, but I believe in contraception.' It's going to be
women voting with their feet."
Gates said
that in the west the bishops said one thing, but ordinary Catholics did
another. "In my country 82% of Catholics say contraception is morally
acceptable. So let the women in Africa decide. The choice is up to them."
She
admitted, though, that she had agonised over whether to speak out in defiance
of the church hierarchy. "Of course I wrestled with this. As a Catholic I
believe in this religion, there are amazing things about this religion, amazing
moral teachings that I do believe in, but I also have to think about how we
keep women alive. I believe in not letting women die, I believe in not letting
babies die, and to me that's more important than arguing about what method of
contraception [is right]."
Being a
woman and a mother were at the heart of her decision to focus on family
planning, said Gates, who has three children aged 16, 13 and 10. "It would
have been nice to stay as a private citizen but part of the reason why I'm so
public is that it does take a woman to speak out about these issues.
"Why
have women not been at the heart of the global health agenda? It's because
we've not had enough women speaking out. We need to give a voice to women all
over the planet.
"This
will be my life's work."
Wednesday's
conference, which brings together 250 delegates from around the world including
Jakaya Kikwete, the president of Tanzania, Chantal Compaoré, first lady of
Burkina Faso, and the Bangladeshi minister of health, AFM Ruhal Haque, is the
launch of what the Gates Foundation is billing "a groundbreaking effort to
make affordable, lifesaving contraceptive, information, services and supplies
available to an additional 120 million girls and women in the world's poorest
countries by 2020".
Gates is
due to announce later on Wednesday the exact amount the foundation is pouring
into improving birth control, but it is likely to be millions of US dollars –
and the hope is that others will raise the fund to more than $4bn. The UK
government is pledging to double its efforts on family planning, up from its
current £90m a year to £180m a year.
In her
interview with the Guardian, Gates said the moment had now come to push
contraception back to the top of the development agenda. "The reason it
fell off the agenda was because we made it controversial – people backed away
because of fear. But today there are 200 million women who want to have access
to contraception, and if we're not serving them that's not right."
She said
that when she and her husband first set up their foundation 18 years ago, they
had originally focused on family planning but had then shifted their agenda to
providing vaccines after realising that childhood mortality was the top issue,
and that women would not choose to have fewer children until they were sure
their children would survive childhood. "But once we saw that was
happening, we could take family planning back on," she said.
It was
meeting women in Africa and Asia on her travels through the developing world,
said Gates, that made her determined to push contraception back on to the
agenda. "Over and over again women have told me that all they want is to
be able to put time between one child and another child. It's a universal thing
to want to feed your children and to educate your children, and women know that
the only way they can do that is not have so many. And this campaign could give
them the tools to make sure they can do that."
The
campaign would include research to look at developing better methods of
contraception, said Gates – and these methods could, in time, benefit women in
the west as well as women in Africa and Asia.
"What
I'm most excited about is thinking about tools that will have fewer side
effects and could be longer-lasting," she said. "Luckily for women in
the west it's not a life-and-death situation, but for women in the developing
countries it is, which is why I believe in putting them at the heart of
it."
• This
article was amended on 11 July 2012. The original version wrongly quoted Gates
as saying 200 billion women wanted access to contraception, rather than 200
million.
 |
Microsoft
co-founder Bill Gates listens while his wife Melinda
Gates speaks to the media
at an advance tour of the newly
constructed $15 million visitor center of the
Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation $500 million campus in Seattle, Washington
February 1, 2012. (Credit: Reuters/Anthony Bolante)
|
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