Tunggadewa Mattangkilang, Balikpapan, East Kalimantan – Family planning authorities are urging the country's highest Islamic authority to declare vasectomies permissible under religious law.
Sugiri Syarief, the head of the National Family Planning Coordinating Board (BKKBN), said that the Indonesian Council of Ulemas (MUI) had recently declared vasectomies haram, and therefore not permissible under Islamic law, at its annual meeting in Padang Panjang, West Sumatra.
"We are currently pushing for the central MUI to come out with a fatwa declaring vasectomy as halal," Sugiri said. But he conceded that so far only the MUI chapters in East Java and the province's Situbondo district had approved the use of vasectomy.
He said that with the blessing from the MUI, the number of men having vasectomies may double. He said that of the 9 million people nationwide who had registered for a government family planning support program, only 1.5 percent were men, and of them only 0.7 percent had had vasectomies.
"The ratio between men and women in family planning is really disparate. One of the constraints in raising the number of male family planning members is the haram fatwa [on vasectomies]," he said.
Vasectomies are a medical procedure that prevent men from releasing sperm.
Sugiri said that Indonesia's population problem was immense, with the number of people growing by about four million each year.
He said that in 2012, the country's population will reach 245 million, up 31 million on a decade ago. The rate of population growth was steeper than in China, whose population of 1.3 billion grew by 73 million people in the past decade.
He said that to help curb population growth, the country's family planning program will seek to raise active members to 28.32 million. "If this target is reached then we are convinced that we can cut down the percentage of the population not receiving family planning services to just 5 percent of fertile couples by 2014," he said.
He estimated that in 2012, there will be 4.5 million pregnant women, and efforts will be made to have all those pregnancies covered by maternity insurance. That would make them new family planning program participants.
The BKKBN, he said, was providing training for 35,000 nurses in the art of inserting and removing intrauterine devices and family planning implants. "Another means is by launching BKKBN TV so that the campaigns of the family planning program can proceed optimally," Sugiri said.
Jufri Yasin, the head of the East Kalimantan provincial chapter of the BKKBN, said that there were 431,338 people participating in the family planning program.
He said that total birth rates in the province had decreased from 4.99 per women in the 1980s to 2.7 per woman now, he said. "We are aiming to further reduce the birth rate to 2.1 per woman by 2014," her said.
He said that to support its program, the provincial chapter has trained 461 nurses and 251 doctors to provide family planning services. It has also trained 425 village heads and 120 public figures as family planning motivators.