This article appeared in Burma
- Women's Voices for Change, Thanakha
Team, Bangkok,
published by ALTSEAN in 2002.
Lady’s Love Powder by Suzanne
Belton (or Ma Suu San)
‘Lady’s Love
Powder for Female Only’ cost me seven Thai Baht at the little local pharmacy in
a Burmese border town in Karen State. The pharmacy sells a range
of home remedies alongside Burmese, Thai and other foreign medicines. Packets of Thai contraceptive pills lay next
to packets of Kathy Pan, a popular ‘menstrual regulator’. ‘Lady’s Love Powder’ caught my eye due to the
picture on the front. The small white
packet shows a voluptuous Asian woman in a seductive pose dressed in her
underwear. Inside the packet there is a
plastic bag that contains a quarter of a teaspoon of bitter, white powder and
the instructions are in Burmese and English.
“Apply this powder to the inside
of the female sexual organ, it will bring back youthful, safeness and flasticity (sic) in the vagina which will ensure happiness
to both husband and wife in their sexual relationship. This powder also cure Canarrhoeal
Vaginities and can be used as Contraceptic
(sic).” says the Lee Meng Ling Drug Company. Was Lady’s Love Powder the Burmese version of
hormone replacement therapy or possibly a new cure for the resistant strains of
gonorrhoea found in this region?
Naturally this made me very curious and I asked several of my Burmese
women friends what the Burmese translation said. According to them it only mentions the
vaginal toning and cleansing qualities of this magical substance and not the
curative or contraceptive effects. In a
way I was relieved. Lady’s Love Powder
is cheap, quack medicine that can be easily purchased by naive women in the
false hope of curing a problematic vaginal discharge or possibly preventing a
pregnancy.
Unplanned pregnancies and
sexually transmitted diseases are problems that many Burmese women face with
little support and a poverty of health resources. Of course it is difficult to quantify such
statements in light of the limited sharing of information that occurs between
the Burman military government and the rest of the world. One informed source, Dr Ba
Thike (1997), a doctor working in Burma, reported
that in the 1980s abortion complications accounted for twenty percent of total hospital
admissions and that for every three women admitted to give birth, one was
admitted for abortion complications. She
went on to say that these alarming statistics remained the same into the early
1990s. In 1992, areas with low resources
and ongoing conflict such as Kachin, Kayin and Chin states and the Mon Division, the rates were
as high as one patient with abortion complications per woman admitted for
delivery. Abortion if early and
uncomplicated can be a relatively minor health event but women can become
unwell and some die from botched abortions.
Dr Ba Thike went on
to say that in the early 90s another study showed that infected abortions were
the cause of 60 percent of direct obstetric deaths and the women’s deaths were
caused by septicaemia, peritonitis, kidney and blood clotting failure. Women in Burma are
clearly attempting to control their fertility despite many barriers. Only in
1991 with the assistance of United Nations Family Planning Association and
international NGOs did the SPDC introduce birth spacing programmes and it would
appear that they have not yet reached Karen State. A medical officer working in Karen State in 2001
informed me that there was no birth spacing programme available but women were
able to buy their contraceptives at the street pharmacies. Women do buy the home remedy Kathy Pan that
is advertised on Burmese TV ‘to regulate their periods’ and some may purchase
the Love Powder, both have dubious contraceptive efficacy. The drain on the health system due to abortions
as well as the immeasurable burden to women is a sad fact.
The records at the Mae Tao
Clinic in Thailand, a health service that offers reproductive health services
to women coming from Burma as day visitors or as longer-term migrant workers,
reflects a crisis in women’s health. In
2001, the Mae Tao Clinic documented 185 abortion complication cases (Out
Patients Department) and 231 cases that needed to be admitted into the
In-patients Department with complications such as sepsis, dehydration, haemorrhage
and shock from abortions and miscarriages. Of the 427 cases, 45 women gave their current
address as somewhere in Burma. The others were all Burmese migrant workers
living in the surrounding urban and rural area of Tak Province who are
Burman or Karen ethnicity. The
definition of abortion needs to be discussed at this point, as it is different
from other places. At the Mae Tao Clinic
the diagnosis of abortion is used to describe any pregnancy that ends either
spontaneously or by direct means before the seventh month of gestation. After
seven months it is called premature labour or just abnormal bleeding (Ante
Partum Haemorrhage). Abortions can be
categorised in several ways including spontaneous or just threatened, to
currently happening or completely finished.
Women who experience a miscarriage or induced abortion can become very
sick with pelvic inflammatory disease, which can cause permanent
infertility. Most of the women who
aborted and were seen by the Mae Tao Clinic reported being married and the vast
majority were over 21 years of age. Many
of the women had experienced a previous episode of abortion/ miscarriage, which
raises several thoughts. It may suggest
that chronic illness such as malaria and unidentified sexually transmitted
infections, which are then compounded by malnourishment, are playing a
significant role in the loss of pregnancies.
Additionally many women already had a number of children and may have
felt their family was already complete.
Many women who attend the Mae Tao Clinic are unaware of modern methods
of contraception or unclear how to use them.
Even if the women are keen to accept contraception they may not be able
to afford to use it. Most of the women
seen by the Mae Tao Clinic are living in poverty and they are given a
contraceptive method free of charge. The
economic situation of many women is extreme as they earn 50 Baht per day
labouring in the agricultural or unskilled manufacturing sector in Thailand where
unprotected pesticide and harmful work practices are common. Thai employers do not favour pregnant female
workers and this in itself may be an inducement to end a pregnancy. An article appearing in The Nation (2002)
reported that the Thai Ministry of Labour would not renew female migrant
worker’s work permits if they were found to be pregnant. This breach of women’s human rights needs to
be challenged. These are just some of
the multiple factors that could contribute to the loss of pregnancies and
Burmese women terminating their pregnancies.
Lady’s Love Powder blatantly
suggests that sex should be fun and pleasurable to men as well as women. I find myself quite liking Lady’s Love
Powder... Imagine if the Burmese
military government would provide safe, cheap and effective reproductive health
services at the community level to their population, maybe men and women could
enjoy their sexual relationships without the fear and worry of unwanted
children and sexually transmitted diseases.
Imagine if the Thai government supported the reproductive health rights
of their migrant workers. Now that would
be revolutionary!
References:
Ba-Thike, Katherine, 1997, Abortion: A Public
Health Problem in Myanmar, Reproductive Health Matters, May,
9, pp94-100.
Narida Suksanan, 2002,
Pregnancy ban worries NGOs, The Nation, 15th January, pp 6A.
Suzanne Belton is
a midwife and PhD candidate at Melbourne University in the Faculty of Medicine, Key Centre for
Women’s Health in Society. She is
interested in fertility issues and reproductive health rights of women from Burma.
Contact address: Key Centre for Women’s Health in Society, Melbourne University, Victoria, Australia.
[email protected]