The Birth of Reproductive Health: A Difficult Delivery

010 About a decade ago, I went wandering around Cairo’s City of the Dead. This might sound like a grim bit of tourism, but my connection to that vast necropolis runs deep—quite literally, as my family is buried there. After visiting their grave, I rambled through the city’s dusty alleyways, past hundreds of years of history. Yet what I remember most about that day was not one of the many magnifi cent tombs, but a simple brick building with a sign, of all things, for a family planning clinic. I was certainly surprised by my discovery; in retrospect, I should not have been. That part of Cairo is home to hundreds of thousands of people for whom looking after the dead is a way of life. Their fertility invigorates the funereal air: the caretaker of my family’s tomb, for example, had a blooming family of his own living near the grave. Where better to offer family planning than in a place so poor that reproduction seemed more a matter of fate than choice?