About 40,000 women and 241,000 newborns die in the country annually from pregnancy and other related complications.

Lack of family planning was also said to have accounted for 610,000 abortions, a rate of 25 abortions per 1000 women aged 15 – 44.

A professor of obstetrics and gnaecology, and Country Director, JHpiego Corporation, Prof Emmanuel Otolorin, made the disclosure at the weekend during at a Family Planning Media Roundtable in Abuja.

Prof. Otolorin said family planning could save 44 percent of women of child-bearing age and also prevent 44 percent neo-natal deaths recorded in the country yearly.

He therefore opined that family planning campaigns in the country should be sustained and strengthened.

The country Director also appealed to couples to embrace the measure as one of the ways to improve the family’s wellbeing.

Quoting data from the National Demography and Health Survey, NDHS 2013, Otolorin said the nation currently accounts for 14 percent of global burden of maternal deaths, and that use of family planning among couples substantially remains a solution to reversing the trend.

According to him, recent data revealed 15 percent of women will have pregnancy and childbirth complications when children are not well-spaced.

He argued that 95 percent of causes of maternal mortality in Nigeria are caused by seven preventable conditions namely bleeding, raised blood pressure with convulsions, infection, unsafe abortion, obstructed labour, malaria and anaemia.

Similarly, new-born mortality in the country, he said, is caused by five conditions which are failure of a child to breathe at birth, prematurity, infections, tetanus infection and diarrhea.

He opined that lack of family planning results in abortions. “Each year, Nigerian women obtain approximately 610,000 abortions, a rate of 25 abortions per 1000 women aged 15 – 44. The rate is much lower in the poor, rural regions of northern Nigerian than in the more economically developed southern regions. An estimated 40 percent of abortions are performed by physicians in established health facilities while the rest are performed by non-trained health practitioners.

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