Family Planning: Mother Of Four Gives Birth To Quadruplets, Cries For Help

Seven years after her fourth child was born and with a decision jointly made with her husband to stop childbearing, 37-year-old Muslimat AbdulWaheed has again been delivered of quadruplets.

The couple who reside in Gwako, a suburb of Gwagwalada area of Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory, said they could barely feed their family of six, hence the decision to stop giving birth.

The husband, Ibrahim Abdulwaheed, a technician, said he does not get work often in Gwako, a timid settlement in Nigeria’s capital, while the wife lost her provision shop to flooding in 2020.

So, an addition to the family will only worsen their precarious situation.

However, for the one time the family could not afford monthly N500 contraceptive pills, the wife got pregnant and eventually gave birth to quadruplets on November 11, leaving her with eight children to cater for.

Mrs Abdulwaheed is among 9.5 million of the 45 million women of reproductive age in Nigeria that want to avoid a pregnancy but couldn’t due to several factors which include poverty.

This results in the increasing rate of unintended pregnancies which can lead to unsafe abortions that account for five to 13 per cent of all maternal deaths and unplanned births.

Although the Nigeria Family Planning Blueprint, 2020-2024, outlines the country’s plans for achieving a revised target modern Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (mCPR) of 27 per cent by 2024, funding remains inadequate to cover the unmet need for family planning services.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), family planning allows individuals and couples to anticipate and attain their desired number of children and the spacing and timing of their births.

-Premium Times