Pregnant (Again) and Poor
Nicholas D. Kristof | New York Times
Nicholas D. Kristof | New York Times
Published: April 4, 2009
Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times: Nahomie Nercure, 30, with some of her nine children in front of a her shack in the Haitian capital, Port au Prince.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti: For all the American and international efforts to fight global poverty, one thing is clear: Those efforts won’t get far as long as women like Nahomie Nercure continue to have 10 children.
Global family-planning efforts have stalled over the last couple of decades, and Nahomie is emblematic both of the lost momentum and of the poverty that results. She is an intelligent 30-year-old woman who wanted only two children, yet now she is eight months pregnant with her 10th.
As we walked through Cité Soleil, the Haitian slum where she lives, her elementary-school-age children ran stark naked around her. The $6-a-month rental shack that they live in — four sleep on the bed, six on the floor beside it — has no food of any kind in it. The family has difficulty paying the fees to keep the children in school.
There’s simply no way to elevate Nahomie’s family, and millions like it around the world, unless we help such women have fewer children. And yet family-planning programs have been shorn of resources and glamour for a generation now.