A spectacular success. No one will dare say otherwise when it comes to the achievements of the Mauritius Family Planning and Welfare Association. Founded on the instigation of Dr Philippe Forget in 1957, the MFPWA is celebrating its 50th anniversary. After the resounding success of its beginnings, the MFPWA may today need a complete revamp and more means. In fact, this organization achieved its success through the hard work and a devoted personnel despite its very limited financial resources. Despite dire opposition from certain quarters.

But today, our birthrate of 0.8% may be due for a large part to illegal abortion. Not contraception.

The reason seems simple. The MFPA has not the means and is counter attacked in some quarters where ?natural methods? the order of the day.

The MFPWA itself published a report a few years ago to indicate that around 20,000 illegal abortions were being carried about each year. The study was made after a disturbing situation noted in public hospitals kept persisting. Around 2,000 women are admitted each year in hospitals following complications following illegal abortions.

Whatever social workers have noted recently tends to indicate that we may be having more than 20,000 illegal abortions per year.

One social worker of the MFPWA noted around 40 cases of pregnant unmarried adolescents in only four different suburbs of the city last month. Most of these girls would most probably have recourse to illegal abortion. As would pregnant teenagers from well-off families, which do not usually open their doors to social workers.

So, if the figure of 20,000 illegal abortions per year is accepted, it would mean that we have more abortions than live births per year. Without these abortions, we would have had more than 40,000 live births per year, which would have led to a demographic explosion.

When the MFPWA, called MFPA on its inception, started campaigning in the early 50s, it met with dire resistance from working class folks of every ethnic group of the island. ?Bon dié doné, bizin pran? ? meaning ?Children are gifts of God that we must accept.? Accepting these gifts were giving families of a dozen children and the MFPA got around this resistance and families of three children maximum became the norm very quickly.

The MFPWA may now be faced with a different task. It had to work in the past with adults, married men and women. There has been a shift over the past few years and the target might be a very sexually active adolescent population. School going or working adolescents who do not know what is a condom, a contraceptive pill or the emergency contraceptive method (the day-after pill). A different world in which college students believe that a girl cannot become pregnant on her first five unprotected intercourses.

When video clips of sex parties of Mauritian college students started to be uploaded on the Internet, it was noted that all those involved were having unprotected sex. It should have triggered a response from some quarters and the sexual education imported in our colleges should have been revamped since then. If ever we have such sexual education in our colleges. And what about those adolescents from suburbs who will never set their feet in a college?

The MFPWA and the government should seek an urgent answer to this problem. And get the necessary means to carry out the job, without the hindrance of some religious authorities.