More Nigerian couples and other individuals have been visiting health facilities to access modern family planning services as a means of surviving the current economic hardship, experts have said.

It was gathered that the number of married women who visit various Family Planning units of hospitals has been increasing as they adopt different methods of contraceptives that suit their body systems.

A medical practitioner and the Osun State Family Planning Coordinator, Mrs. Ololade Margaret Abatan, confirmed that the harsh economic situation in the country has been enabling more acceptability of family planning methods.

She said the narrative is gradually changing from when couples, especially women, used to boycott family planning, thus giving birth to a number of children that is beyond their economic status.

Abatan said the monthly reports from various health facilities indicated a surge in the uptake of modern family planning contraceptives by both the married and unmarried as a way of planning their lives, spacing their pregnancies and living within their financial means.

Enumerating the different kinds of modern contraceptives that people could adopt to control birth and also avoid unwanted pregnancy, she said, “There are different planning methods starting from the male and female condoms, we have the daily pills, then we have different types of injectable, we have the self-injectable aspect, we call it DMPNC, the individual clients can inject themselves at home, there won’t be need for them to come to the facility to meet the provider.

“The trained provider would have trained the clients on how to inject themselves to be able to reduce the hospital visitation. We also have the implant which will be inserted in the arm, we have the one for three years and for five years, and also, we have the IUD that will be put in the womb for women that can use it for longer years even up to 12 years. We have the permanent method for women, we have bilateral tubal ligation and for men, we have vasectomy.”

“We have different methods of modern contraceptive family planning that can be taken by clients and the decision to take up a method will be based on the adequate counselling by the service providers at the facility to ensure that the clients make an informed decision and choice,” she added.

The family planning expert called on more couples to ensure that they give at least, two years interval before getting another pregnancy in order to prevent high complications that may arise while expecting a baby.

Abatan said high risk pregnancies occur when women have childbirth less than two years apart and pregnancies that occur at less than two years intervals.

She said there are tendencies that whenever a woman is pregnant, the husband becomes the sole provider for the family and such a situation could make it more difficult for the man to cater for the family needs alone.

Abatan, who said it is “too many” for couples to have more than four children, urged couples to strike a balance between their economic realities and the number of children to give birth to.

Mele Kyari, the Group Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Ltd (NNPCL), has lost his 25-year-old daughter.

As at the time Investors King was filing this report, details of her death were sketchy.

The deceased, identified as Fatima Kyari passed away on Friday.

Vice-President Kashim Shettima has condoled with the CEO over the tragic incident.

Shettima, who prayed for the peaceful repose of the deceased, asked God to grant the family members the strength to bear the painful exit of their daughter, who was in her prime.

The Vice-President led other mourners at the funeral prayer, held at the Annur Mosque in Abuja.

Brazilian authorities have started shutting down more than 2,000 betting sites, including those that sponsor popular football team Corinthians and other first-division clubs, as part of a push to regulate online gambling.

The country has also banned minors from participating in betting in its new rules meant to sanitize the booming sector.

Latin America’s biggest economy is struggling with what Finance Minister Fernando Haddad has called a betting “pandemic,” prompting the government to tighten the screws on the sector.

Since 2018, when Brazil legalised sports betting sites, online gambling has operated in a regulatory free-for-all, subject to virtually no rules or taxes.

Some of the most popular sites take bets on sporting fixtures, but Brazilians have also become hooked on gambling games like Aviator, where players gamble on the flight of a virtual airplane, or the online casino game Fortune Tiger.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s government has called time on sites that failed to sign up to new regulations due to take effect in January.

The new rules seek to combat fraud and money laundering and protect users, by for example banning minors from betting.

According to the nation, anyone who is not regularized, or in the process of being regularized, is being taken off the air.

The finance ministry disclosed it had identified 2,040 “suspicious domains” which it had asked the telecoms regulatory agency Anatel to block.

On the blacklist is Esportes da Sorte, which sponsors Corinthians, one of Brazil’s most popular football clubs, as well as Athletico Paranaense, Bahia and Gremio de Porto Alegre.

The ministry said the betting sites would be banned from advertising, “which includes, for example, sponsoring football clubs.”

More than 200 other sites will be allowed to continue to operate after agreeing to the new rules.

Brazil’s central bank estimates that 24 million out of Brazil’s 212 million inhabitants, roughly one in nine people, gamble online.

Lula warned recently that betting was causing many low-income Brazilians to get into debt.