Yesterday, on World Population Day, the United Nations Population Fund officially launched 7 Billion Actions -- a campaign to raise awareness and action around our planet's growing population, which is set to reach 7 billion later this year.
The campaign is a wake-up call to the health, environmental, and social challenges associated with rapid population growth. It is also a wake-up call to the importance of voluntary family planning.
In 2011, more than 200 million women worldwide are still denied access to desired family planning services due to unavailable resources or lack of support from their husbands and communities. As a woman, I believe it is time to make universal access to family planning a global priority. And as a woman, I believe it is essential to welcome men into the conversation.
Why Family Planning?
According to World Health Organization statistics, approximately 1,000 women die every day from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. Over 99 percent of these maternal deaths occur in the developing world, in countries where a mother's death can leave children -- and entire families -- in a perilous scenario.
Many, if not the majority, of these women want smaller families but often do not know how to prevent pregnancies. During my travel as Global Ambassador for the public health organization PSI (Population Services International), I have personally met some of these women.
I remember Therese, a woman in the Democratic Republic of Congo, who was so desperate after having given birth to six children that she ingested poisonous herbs to terminate three different pregnancies -- leaving her in agonizing, life threatening pain. Her husband, Victor, watched each time in helpless fear. Like his wife, he had never been given information on family planning methods that could protect his wife and his family.
Their story is all too common and is a reminder that family planning communication must incorporate men into the equation.
Men and Family Planning
Research shows that men have a significant influence over women's reproductive health decisions in the developing world, especially in Africa. Men who receive education on sexual and reproductive health are far more likely to support their partner's decision on family planning.
Despite these facts, many family planning programs continue to follow the traditional woman-focused model, excluding men from research, service provision, and information campaigns.
A program in the Democratic Republic of Congo is addressing this problem, tailoring communication to reach men. Moreover, it uses an innovative and remarkably simple avenue to do so: the cell phone.
Reaching Men in the DRC
In 2011, 70 percent of worldwide cellular phone users live in developing countries. The World Bank has identified mobile phones as one of the most powerful ways to deliver health services and information to people living in remote areas, particularly in largely rural countries like the DRC.
PSI and its local partner, Association de Sante Familiale, saw a unique opportunity within these statistics and, in 2005, launched a family planning hotline in the DRC called Linge Verte.
Open 5 days per week, 8.5 hours per day, Ligne Verte provides free, accurate information on family planning and refers clients to family planning clinics across a wide geographic range.
Most importantly, Ligne Verte provides a safe, confidential zone for Congolese men and women to ask sensitive questions about family planning, as well as other sexual health concerns such as HIV.
To date, 84 percent of Ligne Verte callers have been men. Parallel PSI hotlines in other countries reflect similar statistics. In Benin and Pakistan, men make up 77 percent and 78 percent of callers, respectively, to national PSI family planning hotlines.
These numbers speak for themselves.
Family planning is not a gender specific issue. Men, as much as women, are interested in learning about ways to protect the physical and economic health of their families. They are asking questions and seeking answers.
It is our responsibility to listen and respond to them.
For more information on family planning:
2011 International Conference on Family Planning, Dakar, Senegal, November 29- December 2
Robert Walker: Observing World Population Day
Suzanne Ehlers: We're Counting (On) You
World Population Day (11 July)
World Population Day: A Connection Between Global Warming And ...
But condoms,morning after pills and all that we need to make easier for kids to get cause when they do have sex at least they can be safe. im not saying kids should be having sex, they shouldn't and its wrong to have sex when your young and you really should wait till your older or married but condoms should be more available.
1) STDS - are a REAL fact of life - many, people just are so sexually unaware - rich, poor, educated, uneducated people - many just don't know or consider the impact STDS have on their health and quality of life.
2) Family planning is vital for many - people who are too poor to properly look after themselves let alone a child need information as well as people who may be able to afford a child but are not ready in other ways for the responsibility.
3) People need to know that they can own their own reproductive rights
4) Myths need to be dispelled - keeping a man through having a child is the quickest way to lose him for example and men can play a very active part in their own contraception and control of reproductive rights
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You can't have it both ways, really.
If you believe that a woman has a right to terminate her pregnancy, because the fetus is merely an extension of her body, then you are de facto making this a woman's rights issue - and men don't have a real say in the matter either way.
That's my own belief, btw.
But the inevitable corollary is that family planning is also a woman's issue. If a woman chooses not to get pregnant, she won't. And if she does anyway, because of the failure of her birth control, she can abort.
Men may be more, or less, responsible. But women bear the burden of carrying, bearing and (too often) raising the child whether their men are responsible or not.
You can protest against that all you want, or invite men into some conversation all you want, but at the end of the day, biology is destiny.
Of course, if men had to bear the burden of pregnancy, childbirth and child rearing, the conversation would be entirely different.
But we're having this conversation on planet Earth, not Zandori.
Hence 99 percent of the responsibility should rest with women and they should drive the creation of support systems for their own benefit.
Just a shot in the dark ...
For far too many First World women today, that is what men are. A relationship that actually last long enough to exchange family names is becoming more unusual among the younger generation. We old folks--why, I'll be lucky to see another fifty or sixty years, myself--hold standards that the teens and twenties set seem to disdain.
The welfare that's going on is the welfare to CEOs and Wallstreet - where ordinary American workers are not being payed a fair honest wage at the end of the day - where the lions share of profits from business and labor are going to a relatively few obscenely rich individuals.
The rich are not the ones who create wealth in this country. The wealth creators are the ordinary Americans who go to work every day for their families. Without Labor - there would be no Capital. LABOR IS PRIMARY and more important than Capital.
All from suggesting that we encourage people to have fewer children. Not mandate. Encourage.
This article shows that many women would like to have fewer children....and rightly adds that men often want to be involved. A woman who bears three children instead of six has more resources to keep those children healthy.....and the same is true of her husband.
We are moving out of the era when disease, war, drought and famine often made it hard to keep ANY children alive. But those killers are waiting in the wings, to reappear with a vengence if we overrun the natural resources at our disposal....and these day, we can't migrate to somewhere else when that happens. The whole planet is feeling the strain now. There's nowhere to go.
It is not "genocide" to let women and men plan their families. A world wide reduction in population from 8 billion to 4 billion, over three or four generations, is not a plan to "make humanity extinct."
Popultions WILL drop. We can do it ourselves, in a planned way that benefits our children, their children and our planet....or we can wait until we are slaughtering each other by the millions, not for oil but for food and water, with disease waiting to decimate the victors.
Agreed. But it would realistically take 6-7 generations to get down there. Folks just aren't dying as fast as they used to.
I've admired Ashley ever since I first saw "Ruby in Paradise" - and like what she writes here. But to me, by far the overwhelming issue we face right now is crushing economic exploitation by the haves over the have nots. Until this fundamental crisis is addressed in our society - I fear not much more will be accomplished with other important human values.
The oppression of money and power, to the point where millions of American men and women now struggle increasingly - 10% unemployed, 10% under-employed, wages that have not been increased since the 1970s - life ruining costs for health care, unaffordable homes - etc. means that many families are in the quicksand right now and sinking. And while you're in the quicksand, you're first priority is to somehow not sink into oblivion. That has become increasingly more the crisis facing millions here in America -
This is not an either/or situation. It's not a "first we do this, than we do that" situation. You think things are hard when gas is $4 a gallon? Do nothing to ease the population pressures on the planet, then see what life is like when drinking water is $4 a gallon.
We need to work on all these situations. We need to work hard. We need to work now.
Yes. Allow men as well as women the right to terminate a pregnancy, for ANY REASON.
But in that line in the sand LIES the main problem: The decition to be a father and to pay for that child is removed from him. I 100% understand your view and BY NO MEANS I am an arguing against any of its points, but the equation breaks down...every....single...time... when it gets to that juncture.
If you give the option for fathers to "be" or "not to be fathers" at some level of equal footing with a woman, then you would end up with a massive chaos even worst than now as men every where would be free to walk away without repercussion. The "biological difference" then becomes a burden on the woman, regardless of choice.
If you do not give the option to the father (which is how it is today), then you end with the current injustice of taking that "choice" away from him and subjugating his future the choice made by the woman.
In a society that strives to reach "equality" level between it is assumed two adults make a choice to have sex aware of the consequences. Yet, here in America, the culture and the laws still places the "guilt" on the man side while at the same time not giving him equal rights. This is actually due in great part to fairly backwards and traditionalist view of the roles.