Pressure to have baby boys outweighs Congolese women’s health concerns
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, women bear the pressure of having baby boys, even when it conflicts with their personal choices or their health.
Gloria Masanka almost died giving birth to her first child. She later lost twins and endured years of dangerous high blood pressure during pregnancy.
Now, holding her youngest daughter in her arms, she says she does not want any more children.
But in the eyes of her family, her work is not done.
She said she doesn’t want to have more children. But she has two daughters, and there is pressure to have boys.
“Every day, for my in-laws, this is a concern,” she said. “The girls are going to leave. They will be…well, they use a term, they will be “purchased” by the other family.”
She said she is likely to continue trying for a boy.
She herself is a working mom, employed as a radio presenter at Congo’s national broadcaster, and is frustrated at the views people continue to hold about women’s place in society.
“Today, we have daughters who are presidents of the Republic, we have daughters, women who occupy high positions,” she said.
“The African mentality –– although the world is changing, things are changing––but in other ways, on certain things, things don’t change.”
Perpetuate family legacies
Outside a local cafe, housewife Regine Ntumba said she had wanted to have four children. Now, she has six. Her first four were girls, and she finally gave birth to a boy on the fifth try.
Her husband, Prosper Mbumba, is a human rights activist who admits that his work conflicts with some of the cultural pressures the family is subject to.
“My culture and the cultural values, the family, all that, I was going to feel a certain absence because, indeed, girls are going to marry, children that girls are going to have, they are children who will belong to other families, to others to other nations,” he said.
Ntumba said she felt the pressure, too, though she would have been happy to stop having children earlier. “But it was not up to me. It is the man who has the last word,” she said.
Complicating the risks for women in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa is the pressure — heaped more on women than men — to produce male heirs to perpetuate clan lines.
Because daughters often marry men from different clans or tribes, sons are seen as necessary to sustain their forefathers’ legacies.
The belief is so entrenched that many women accept it as justified, even if repeated pregnancies endanger their health.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has one of the highest fertility rates anywhere in the world, at 5.9 children per woman, according to United Nations figures.
The rate is largely fueled by cultural considerations that favor early marriage and large families, in addition to inadequate access to contraception.
Access to family planning
About 29% of Congolese women, married or unmarried, cite an “unmet need” for family planning, whether to space births or to stop having kids, according to the United Nations Population Fund.
Congolese authorities say they want to rectify that in a five-year strategic plan aiming to provide “access to quality family planning information and services at an affordable cost” to every woman of childbearing age by 2030.
But it is an enormous task in a country the size of Western Europe, with poor infrastructure and armed rebellion in the east.
The quest for male heirs is woven into a societal fabric that exposes many women to unwanted childbearing, said Patrick Djemo, a physician who leads MSI Reproductive Choices in Congo.
He said too many pregnancies, especially if they are too close together, are a health risk for women.
Aside from the risks, he also said contraception is not a decision left up to women alone.
“The data from the surveys that have been carried out so far around the question shows that the woman who wants to take a contraceptive product does not decide alone,” he said.
“We are in an African society in which men really have power over a lot of things, especially everything related to sexual matters.”
