Susheela Singh and Jacqueline Darroch: turning research into advocacy for reproductive health

摘要

The importance of family planning was always obvious to Susheela Singh. As a young girl growing up in Guyana in South America, she had to share the family's resources with nine siblings. Such family sizes weren't unusual for Guyana in the 1950s, but this dynamic was changing rapidly. "My mother had ten children, but my younger aunts were only having four", Singh said. So when Singh went to university in the 1960s, sociology and demography seemed a natural choice. For her PhD in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, she focused on fertility and childbearing and its role in population growth. Halfway around the world, at the University of Cologne, in Germany, Jacqueline Darroch was studying on a Fulbright scholarship. There, she, too, was bitten by the demography bug after reading a book of lectures by Ron Freedman on population growth. Too many women, Darroch realised, were being held back by large family sizes, with no way to control their reproductive futures. With their focus on reproductive health, Darroch and Singh arrived at the Guttmacher Institute, a US-based nonprofit think tank that focuses on public policy related to sexual and reproductive health. Over the past 30 years, both women have helped to redefine research in reproductive health. "If we ever had a paragon of how evidence leads to advocacy, these women represent the best", said Amy Tsui of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It's a view shared by Willard Cates, President Emeritus of FHI360: "Both of them are scientists at their core. They are careful about data analysis, rigorous in their methodology, and present their findings in a way that is easy to understand."