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(video) Melinda Gates speaks out about contraception

There’s a global movement waiting to happen.

Melinda Gates, wife of Bill Gates, was raised a Catholic and still considers herself to be a Catholic. And yet she uses contraception with no hesitation, along with 1 billion other people in the world. They want the power to plan their own lives and to raise healthier, better educated and more prosperous families. And shouldn’t everyone be free to decide whether they do or do not want to conceive a child?

Well – they’re not. Birth control has almost completely and totally disappeared from the Global Health Agenda – and as a result, 100,000 women every year die in childbirth who didn’t want to be pregnant.

Melinda’s mission to put birth control back on the agenda is fuelled by the desire to educate and inform people that they have a choice. Just watch. You have to:

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Top Comments

Anon for this because it's so 12 years ago

Melinda Gates is awesome. Sadly, the Catholic church does not count her as one of their own since using contraception technically incurs automatic excommunication. Funnily enough the Catholic church doesn't enforce this since 85% of Catholic women use birth control.

Whilst doing Catholic marriage prep (overseas) I was forced to produce three months of charting of my periods and cervical fluid to the priests off-sider to prove that I understand Catholic Family Planning, pre marriage. I was also forced to watch (with my fiancé) footage of aborted foetuses at different stages of development as part of the anti-abortion drive during the marriage planning weekend. At the time I was actually 14 weeks pregnant, so describing the footage as disturbing was a gigantic understatement. Likewise the irrelevance of charting my cervical fluid!!!


Jash 12 years ago

Anonymous I don't disagree with you about how pharmaceutical companies, in our patriarchal society, are ever trying to control female bodily functions. I wish there were more tampering with mens for a change! But the World Health Organisation does not agree with the Catholic stance on condoms. And I find it quite ironic that a blatantly sexist organisation like the Catholic church is lecturing African peoples on their cultural beliefs about how to better treat women. How does your natural methods approach to contraception prevent pregnancies in women who are raped or abused? Is the Catholic church going to make a withdrawal from its beloved bank to help these women feed their children? I agree with you about the need for education but I definitely don't think it is the job of a religious organisation to deliver it, especially when you say people should be able to make their own decisions which the Catholic church has never encouraged with its dependence on the early brain-washing of children. Education and religion should be a separate thing, women's health and religion should be a separate thing. We are far too intellligent a race of people now to need guidance from an archaic institution like the Catholic church. If every woman in the world just studied gender and women's studies, they would need no further insight into their true situation and would begin to live with their eyes open.

Earl Grey 12 years ago

I mostly agree with you, except on your anti-male sentiment. Yes there are morons that are male, same goes for female. There are massive problems in the world, if the educated and intelligent work together they will solve some of them. If you split those people by introducing an issue that's not especially related, then you're going to get less people solving the important issues. Reducing the world's population and allowing women and families to control how many kids they have, can be solved by people, it doesn't have to be women that solve it and it isn't men in a first world country that are to blame for it. There's enough hatred in the world without hating men. Let's all work together.