Maintaining Family Planning Momentum

By Amy Phillips Bursch, Media Relations Manager

Remember this little shindig in July?

Yes! The London Summit on Family Planning! It was a great opportunity to put family planning back on the world’s agenda where it belongs and make some real promises. In fact, global leaders vowed to provide 120 million of the world’s poorest women the ability to plan their families by 2020. Nice!

Of course, anytime you have a big, fancy summit like this one, it’s possible that everyone will come together, have great discussions, reach agreements, shake hands, fly home, and get sidetracked. An event Monday at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars focused on maintaining the momentum.

A huge crowd turned out – two overflow rooms were required to hold everyone. Momentum! Karen Hardee, a senior fellow at Futures Group, led the discussion. Here are a few highlights:

• Win Brown, senior program officer with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said there is much agreement that family planning programs must offer quality services, promote equity, protect human rights, integrate well with other health care and be completely voluntary. He said experts are working on how to ensure that the $2.6 billion committed during the Summit has the greatest possible impact.
• Julia Bunting of the UK’s Department for International Development said that while the $2.6 billion in commitments is a huge amount, money isn’t enough. Access and delivery of contraceptive knowledge and supplies are still issues. Bunting said one of the biggest accomplishments of the Summit was to put family planning back on the world’s front burner.
• Scott Radloff, director of the Office of Population and Reproductive Health for USAID, cautioned that results won’t be instantaneous – it typically takes 20 years for countries to move from low-use to high-use of family planning. Radloff said, however, that real progress can be made in areas of Africa and South Asia, where family planning investments have long been neglected.
• Jill Sheffield, founder and president of Women Deliver and co-founder of Family Care International, was thrilled by the increased attention to family planning that the London Summit provided. “Girls and women have suffered from this neglect – if women can’t plan their fertility, they can’t plan their lives,” she said. “We can’t let the opposition control the argument.”

Amen to that!

Hey "Pro-Lifers": Family Planning Saves Lives. So Why Oppose It?

By Amy Phillips Bursch, Media Relations Manager

 

This is one thing I’ll never, ever understand: Family planning saves lives. Family planning prevents unplanned pregnancies. No unplanned pregnancies equals way fewer abortions. So why aren’t the hard-core “pro-lifers” in favor of family planning?

There are plenty of reasonable people out there who oppose a woman’s right to choose but fully support family planning, of course. I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about the activists and organizations who think abstinence is the only acceptable option to prevent pregnancy. That’s unrealistic, and it hurts women, infants and families. How? Here are some facts:

Family planning helps women -- and their children. (Legends2K/Flickr)

• A U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) analysis found that if moms waited three years between pregnancies to have another baby, 1.6 million infant and child deaths could be prevented every year.
• The Guttmacher Institute estimates that in 2012, 291,000 women in developing nations will die from pregnancy-related causes. At least 104,000 of those women didn’t want to be pregnant in the first place.
• According to the World Health Organization (WHO), women under 20 are significantly more likely to die after giving birth than are women ages 20-29. Family planning allows younger women to wait to have children when their bodies can better handle pregnancy.
• The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) reports that babies of mothers who die are more likely to die themselves.
• A Guttmacher Institute analysis found that family planning (at current levels) prevents 138 million abortions – including 40 million unsafe ones – each year in developing countries. An additional 26 million abortions (16 million unsafe) would be prevented if women who want to avoid pregnancy but don’t have modern methods of contraception had them.
• Unsafe abortions account for 13% of maternal deaths around the world, according to the WHO. I think it’s safe to say that practically none of those women would have died from unsafe abortion if they hadn’t been pregnant in the first place.

But some “pro-life” organizations can’t be persuaded. The “personhood” people want fertilized eggs to be given all the rights of full-grown humans, making the most effective forms of contraception illegal. Personhood USA on Wednesday sent out a tweet saying that “The lie: birth control prevents pregnancy. The truth: most will get pregnant & ‘need’ an abortion.” I guess infertile couples should use contraception, then?

The American Life League actively promotes the falsehood that the “Pill Kills Babies.”  A new group, 1Flesh, has also jumped on the "pill kills" bandwagon, and OneMore Soul says “an openness towards having children yields specific medicalbenefits.” (Huh?)

Justice for All’s handbook, “Abortion: From Debate to Dialogue,” says birth control pills are “as if the child entering the uterus is looking for his camping spot and finds “NO CAMPING!” signs … he dies from lack of nutrition and hydration.” It also says that “since self-control seems to be the root cause of unwanted pregnancies, why not focus our efforts on teaching people how to be abstinent”? I’m sure married couples who don’t wish to become pregnant will find that suggestion just peachy.

It's worth repeating: Family planning saves lives. Family planning prevents abortions. Family planning helps gives women power over their own futures. 

You really want to oppose all of that, "pro-lifers"? Really? REALLY?

New Law Benefits Women, Planet

By Amy Phillips Bursch, Media Relations Manager

Happy Contraception Day! Today’s the day that most insurance plans in the United States have to start covering birth control with no co-pays under the Affordable Care Act. As a woman who’s spent a fair amount of effort and money avoiding motherhood, I couldn’t be more pleased.  Birth control can be very expensive, and laws that help increase access are a great thing in my book.

But you don’t have to be a woman of a certain (reproductive) age to benefit from expanded access to contraception. Contraception is good for the women you care about, their families, their communities and the planet. And who could possibly be against that? (Well, plenty of people, but I’ll touch on that later.)

First up: Women. It’s not just the childless by choice who benefit from contraception. Birth control allows women to wait to have babies until they’re ready. When women can plan and appropriately space their pregnancies, they and their babies are healthier. According to the reproductive health gurus at the Guttmacher Institute, “Women whose pregnancies are planned are more likely to receive timely prenatal care. They are less likely to smoke or drink during pregnancy, and more likely to breast-feed once their baby is born.” That’s good stuff.

Using these just got a lot more affordable. (outcast104/Flickr)

The typical American woman only wants two children. Contraception allows families to have the number of children they’re comfortable raising – and give those children the best possible shot at success. A child who’s received good health care and a great education is more likely to grow up to be a productive member of society. That helps entire nations succeed – and in our complex, interconnected global economy, we need as much success as we can get.

So how does contraception help the planet? In one number: 26.8 billion. That’s how many people the United Nations projects will be sharing Earth in 2100 if we don’t slow down population growth. Keep in mind that we have about 7.1 billion people on the planet right now. Picture nearly four times as many people struggling to find (and afford) water, food and energy on a planet where water, food and energy are already scarce in many areas. It’s a recipe for disaster, but it’s an entirely preventable disaster if we take action.

By Guttmacher’s projections, 222 million women in the developing world don’t have access to affordable and appropriate contraception. Here in the United States, nearly half of all pregnancies are unplanned. By expanding access both here (thanks, President Obama!) and abroad (thanks, Melinda Gates, UNFPA, USAID and friends!), we can reduce unintended births, slow down population growth and give the people of 2100 a little more breathing room.

Sounds great, right? Not to everyone, unfortunately. The tentacles of sexism are long and tightly wrapped around societies – including ours. The collective right-wing freakout over the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate is only the latest example. While many of us see women’s equality as an inalienable right, powerful interests see it as a threat. That’s why we can’t rest. We have to keep fighting the forces that would be happy to see all women barefoot and pregnant and confined to making sandwiches in the world’s kitchens.

The Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage is a great step in the right direction, and it will help women. And men. And communities. And right-wingers, even though they claim otherwise. And our planet. And the people of 2100. Here’s hoping the long fight for gender equity is done by then.