Is 'the pill' available? That's the question I want to ask the doctors of the Bulape Hospital and Health Zone in rural Congo (DRC).
I never thought about asking in the past. I had heard most rural Congolese considered a form of their retirement plan. Also, I knew that the Congolese families had many children to make allowance for the high child mortality rate. It is a fact, one in five children do not live to their fifth birthday.
But I failed to think about the Congolese women. Child birth complications kill one out of thirteen of them.
For more about the poverty and the pill, please read the article below or in its entirety.
In almost every village we stop in, we chat with families whose huts overflow with small children - whom the parents can't always afford to educate, feed or protect from disease.
Here in Kinshasa, we met Emilie Lunda, 25, who had nearly died during childbirth a few days earlier. Doctors saved her life, but her baby died. And she is still recuperating in a hospital and doesn't know how she will pay the bill.
"I didn't want to get pregnant," Emilie told us here in the Congolese capital. "I was afraid of getting pregnant." But she had never heard of birth control.
In rural parts of Congo Republic, the other Congo to the north, we found that even when people had heard of contraception, they often regarded it as unaffordable.
Most appalling, all the clinics and hospitals we visited in Congo Republic said that they would sell contraceptives only to women who brought their husbands in with them to prove that the husband accepted birth control.
