Bill Gates' Catholic wife Melinda: My agony at being brought up to believe contraceptives are sinful... but wanting women to have a choice

My Catholic upbringing has always been a driving force behind my work at the Gates Foundation.



But nobody felt the need to bring it up until three months ago, when I started talking about the hundreds of millions of women in poor countries who want and need – but don’t have – access to contraceptives.

Now, the question I get more than any other is: ‘Given the Church’s teaching, was it hard for you to advocate birth control?’



Mission: Melinda Gates and her husband Bill attend to a child as they meet with members of the Mushar community near Patna, India

The answer is: ‘Yes.’ It was very hard for me to take a stand on this issue. I spent years wrestling with my feelings. Many people I love and respect – friends, former teachers, members of my church – believe contraceptives are a sin. I didn’t want to upset them.

And the Church itself means a lot to me. I attended Catholic schools. My great-aunt, the woman who taught me to read when I was a little girl, was a nun. My Catholic values have so much to do with the kind of person and mother I am, and I was reluctant to stir up controversy.

But when Bill and I got married, his mother wrote us a letter that included a quotation from the Book of Luke: ‘For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.’

I have been given the privilege to travel extensively in developing countries, to learn what life is like for women and girls.

Bill Gates holds a baby in Mozambique during a visit to a local hospital for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

I have seen teenage mothers with broken bodies because they had one baby after another (or, as one woman said to me, ‘a baby on the back and another inside’). I have heard women describe their desperate struggle to get birth control.

The unlucky ones spend their meagre savings on counterfeit contraceptives sold by unscrupulous vendors. The lucky ones walk an entire day to get to a health clinic that may or may not have contraceptives in stock.

I felt compelled to do something about the things I’ve learned. I recently travelled to London to co-host the historic Family Planning Summit with the British Government. I wanted to talk about our goal of giving 120 million women access to contraceptives by 2020, but I kept being asked about my religion instead. I was disappointed they didn’t want to talk about how access to contraceptives will transform women’s lives. You should be proud of your country’s leadership in sponsoring this lifesaving summit.

David Cameron, who has shown courage in maintaining the UK’s foreign aid budget in tough economic times, is an inspiring champion for women and girls. The pounds Britain invests in family planning aid will make it possible for parents in developing countries to raise healthy and productive families.

The church doctrine on contraceptives is very clear, so I understand why people ask me how I reconcile my faith and my conscience.

But I am inspired by the voluminous Catholic literature on God’s commitment to the poor. I received my Catholic education at Ursuline Academy, where we were taught to live out our motto, serviam – ‘I will serve’. I would not be so passionate about saving women’s lives if I hadn’t been steeped in teachings about social justice.

This is the key point for me. Access to contraceptives is a social justice issue. Birth control gave me the power to lead the life I wanted. I attended college, built a fulfilling career, and had the number of children I wanted, when I wanted.

Virtually all of us reading this newspaper had the opportunity to use contraceptives to determine our future. The vast majority of us did so without a second thought. There is no reason why poor women wouldn’t want the same level of self-determination that we exercise as a matter of course. In fact, they do want it.

Two weeks ago, I visited Niger, a large, arid country in West Africa where the average woman gives birth to more than seven children. The United Nations ranks 187 countries in what it calls the Human Development Index. Last year, Niger came in second to last.

In the village of Talle, on the edge of the Sahel Desert, I met a woman named Sadi Seyni. She was breast-feeding her youngest child when I wandered by and she invited me into her one-room, mud-brick home.

Sadi speaks Hausa, and through a translator she told me she has six children, five girls and a boy. She didn’t know about contraceptives until after her third child, and now she walks ten miles to get contraceptive injections every three months. She wants more children eventually but plans to wait until her youngest is four years old before she gets pregnant again.

When I asked her why, she said it’s important to ‘give yourself and your children a break’. The science backs Sadi up. If every mother spaced her children at least two years apart, it would save the lives of two million children every year.

Bill Gates, left, smiles with his wife Melinda and Bill Gates are renowned for their charity work especially in preventing poverty and disease in less developed countries

‘I really want my children’s lives to be different from mine,’ Sadi told me. ‘I am suffering. I didn’t have a chance to go to school. I want my children to have the means to take care of themselves.’

She is worried her oldest daughter won’t be able to keep attending school because the walk isn’t safe.

This yearning for education is the most consistent theme in my conversations with women. Every single mother I’ve talked to wants her children to go to school, because it’s the clearest path to a better life.

But this dream also depends on access to contraceptives. In very large families, older children typically stay home to help care for the youngest, or go to work to supplement their parents’ income. Many families simply don’t have enough money to pay school fees for all of their children. And many young girls end their schooling early because they get pregnant.

These are just some of the reasons why I was so moved by the world’s resolve to address these challenges at the Family Planning Summit. The summit put a women’s issue at the centre of the global-health agenda.

There were hundreds of partners gathered in London – donor governments, development agencies, private-sector companies and governments and civil-society organisations from developing countries – combining their considerable resources to realise a single vision of transformation for women and girls, their families, their communities and their nations.

This is a milestone and it will change the course of development. Now, I am focused on keeping the momentum going for the next eight years and beyond, when the work we promised to do together must actually get done.

I am optimistic because the Gates Foundation and the UK have many partners. Leaders from dozens of developing countries attended the summit and made pledges to expand access to women in their countries. Those commitments are a promise that this work will be a priority in poor countries for years to come.

Looking back on the months I have spent thinking about family planning day and night, one irony stands out. Despite the media’s concern with my faith, the truth is that this experience has helped me think more seriously about it. I have been contacted by thousands of Catholic women who tell me they are inspired by what I’m doing. That has been a humbling experience.