‘Women without biological children are childless, not barren’

Campaigners are stepping up attempts to define women who are yet to have biological children as ‘childless’ instead of ‘barren.’

Nana Yaw Osei, CEO of ACCOG

As part of efforts, hundreds of Ghanaians are expected to converge in Accra on Sunday, March 24 for a maiden national conference on childlessness and fundraising concert aimed at raising funds to assist childless couples explore other ways of becoming parents.

The Association of Childless Couples of Ghana (ACCOG), a non-governmental organization (NGO) is leading the national conference with collaboration from the Department of Social Welfare and the Gender Violence Survivors Support Network (GVSSN).

According to Nana Yaw Osei, Chief Executive of ACCOG, the conference would emphasise the point that a couple’s inability to have children does not automatically mean the female spouse is barren. Rather, the couple is childless because there is always the possibility of having a child. 

The conference, he said, was only one of the activities through which ACCOG wished to “reduce incidences of stigmatisation of women who do not yet have children of their own.”

In this regard, Sunday’s conference will seek to provide a platform for childless couples to enjoy the benefits of marriage by facilitating their access to other options of having children, including adoption and to provide counseling and other support services to those divorced as a result of childlessness.

In particular, the proceeds from the conference, tickets for which are selling at GHC50, “shall be used to expand our services to other regions, sponsor some members for ARTs treatments,” ACCOG pledged.

Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) includes all fertility treatments in which both eggs and sperms are handled. In general, ART procedures involve surgically removing eggs from a woman’s ovaries, combining them with sperm in the laboratory, and returning them to the woman’s body or donating them to another woman, according to the fertilitylifelines portal.

This was published in the Friday March 22, 2013 edition of the Public Agenda Newspaper.