While the tone and tenor in which Bihar’s Chief Minister Nitish Kumar raked the topic of family planning in the State Assembly can be debated, it has sparked a controversy over his remarks being ‘culturally inappropriate.’
What Mr. Kumar was referring to in crude terms is withdrawal method or coitus interruptus, one of the methods of family planning where in the act of penetration does not end up in the man ejaculating inside the woman, thus decreasing the chances of conceiving.
Early roots of family planning are laid in schools as adolescents start discussing reproductive and sexual health in what was deemed as ‘sex education’ in the National Education Policy’s (NEP) draft version released in 2019.
