At the Fistula Foundation we work every day to help women injured in childbirth in Africa and Asia, get life-transforming surgery to take them from li...

Advocates of family planning made fiscal strides at the London Summit on Family Planning on Wednesday. At the event, co-hosted by The Bill & Melin...

Investing in family planning for adolescent girls is not only the right thing to do, it's smart economics.

We must ensure that women -- especially young women -- are aware of their rights and empowered to demand family planning services and that they are able to do this regardless of where they live, or how much money they have.

High levels of unmet need for contraception around the world have a very negative impact on women's and children's health and survival as well as on the prosperity of communities and nations. The benefits of meeting this need are clear.

The United Nations Population Fund states that reproductive health problems remain the leading cause of illness and death for women of childbearing age worldwide. To put it in stark figures: 800 women die in childbirth every day.

By accelerating the demographic transition and shifting dependency ratios, it turns out that investing in family planning can also be a solid investment producing dividends for years to come.

For most of us, a new baby coming into the family is ample reason for joy and celebration. But imagine a world where a new pregnancy means having to choose which beloved child to feed, clothe, or provide medicine to.

Every two minutes, a woman dies from complications related to pregnancy. Even more tragic: many of these deaths could be prevented with a simple and cost-effective solution -- voluntary family planning.

The evidence is clear: Family planning improves health, empowers women, and helps reduce poverty. Contraceptive services are one of the best investments a country can make in its future.

Even when highly effective biomedical interventions that are focused on the individual -- like contraception -- are available, factors beyond individual control often pose obstacles to their use.

On World Population Day, July 11, 2012, the U.K. Government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will host the ground breaking London Summit on Family Planning.

Providing women and their families with access to an array of effective, evidence-based programs allows them to select the approach that meets their needs and belief systems, is the best strategy to ensure the most lives are saved and families are lifted up.

Providing family planning information and services to millions of women and girls in the poorest countries in the world gives them the opportunity to determine their own futures, and the best future for their children. As a woman and a mother, I can't imagine anything more important.

The Rio+20 outcome document -- though 49 pages long and consisting of 23,917 words -- mentions women in less than 0.01 percent of the entire text.

The global community has the chance to achieve transformational results that will save millions of lives. This is not business as usual.

Both the Global Family Planning Summit and research published in The Lancet potentially obscure the fact that, to be blunt, a wealthy woman in a poor country is likely to have better access to care than a poor woman in a wealthy country.