Paper short abstract:

The 1970s saw a sharp shift in rhetoric on women's reproductive health in Ghana. From an economic development policy, family planning became a cornerstone of PHC. However, gendered biases survived this shift and restricted promises of 'health for all'.

Paper long abstract:

When family planning came to Ghana in the late 1960s, it was prescriptive, funded by - largely US - philanthropic organisations. They worked alongside the Ghanaian government, which was keen to reinvigorate the nation with renewed promises of development. Family planning was about population control, its framework was economic development. Family planning programmes promised prosperity for individual families and threatened stagnated national growth if fertility was not reined in. By the time the National Family Planning Programme was launched in May 1970, there were already worries about contraceptives being offered outside of a maternal and child health (MCH) system. The 1970s saw a shift both 'on the ground' and at the international level. Throughout the 1970s Primary Health Care (PHC) was being formulated at the international level. A shift towards PHC began to take place de facto in Ghana at the same. The promise of health for all can be understood in a longer historical trajectory through looking at women's reproductive health. Traditional birth attendants, long feared by governments hoping to spread orthodox medicine, were suddenly to be embraced. It was no longer seen as appropriate to run a family planning system that was not anchored in health practices. Women, long targeted for nutrition programmes, homecraft classes and mothercraft talks, were officially recognised as drivers of localised health care and, in theory, offered support. This paper will argue that gendered biases seeped into PHC from its inception, compromising promises of 'health for all.'