Reproductive rights advocates issued a collective condemnation Tuesday of a draft proposal by the Bush administration to set new restrictions on domestic family planning programs.

Under the draft proposal, federally funded hospitals and clinics that provide family planning services would be required to promise in writing that they will turn a blind eye to health care providers’ views on abortion and certain kinds of birth control, such as emergency contraception.

For full article, visit:
http://www.womensenews.org/article

In a spectacular act of complicity with the religious right, the Department of Health and Human Services Monday released a proposal that allows any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman’s access to contraception. In order to do this, the Department is attempting to redefine many forms of contraception, the birth control 40% of Americans use, as abortion. Doing so protects extremists under the Weldon and Church amendments. Those laws prohibit federal grant recipients from requiring employees to help provide or refer for abortion services. The “Definitions” section of the HHS proposal states…

For full article, visit:
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2008

This article discusses how fertility relates to social status with the use of a new dataset, several times larger than the ones used so far. The status-fertility relation is investigated over several centuries, across world regions and by the type of status-measure. The study reveals that as fertility declines, there is a general shift from a positive to a negative or neutral status-fertility relation. Those with high income/wealth or high occupation/social class switch from having relatively many to fewer or the same number of children as others. Education, however, depresses fertility for as long as this relation is observed (from early in the 20th century).

For full article, visit:
http://www.demographic-research.org/Volumes/Vol18/5/

Thanks to Gary Merritt for this article.
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Family planning in the world’s poorest countries should be dealt with as a higher priority than tackling HIV and Aids, an environmental campaigner has told a science festival.

Founder-director of Forum for the Future Jonathon Porritt told an audience at the Cheltenham Science Festival that failing to prioritise family-planning programmes will have a more damaging impact than HIV and AIDS.

For full article, visit:
http://lifestyle.aol.co.uk

The United Nations warns that a sharp decline in international funding for reproductive health is threatening global efforts to reduce poverty, improve health and empower women worldwide.

“This is especially evident in the case of funding for family planning where absolute dollar amounts are lower than they were in 1995,” says Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in a report released here.

If this trend is not reversed, he cautions, it will have “serious implications for the ability of countries to address the unmet need for such services, and could undermine efforts to prevent unintended pregnancies and reduce maternal and infant mortality.”

For full article, visit:
http://www.asiantribune.com/?q=node/10522

The worldwide demand for family planning services is growing because of two trends: the burgeoning numbers of young people entering childbearing age and the increasing adoption of contraceptive use. “Either trend would lead to greater demand,” said Toshiko Kaneda, co-author of the Population Reference Bureau’s new data sheet, Family Planning Worldwide 2008, “but the two acting together mean there are likely to be huge increases in the future.” This PRB data sheet presents information about women, fertility rates, and contraceptive methods used in more than 150 countries. It was prepared by Donna Clifton, Toshiko Kaneda, and Lori Ashford.

The growth will be especially strong in some countries. The new data sheet shows that the number of women ages 15 to 49, the primary audience for family planning services, will jump 30 percent, from 8.9 million to 11.6 million, between 2005 and 2015 in Tanzania, for example. However, the number women using modern contraception will grow more, by 90 percent. In Peru, where use is already high and not projected to increase as much, the number of modern contraceptive users will grow from 3.7 million to 4.5 million, primarily because of population growth.

For full article, visit:
http://www.prb.org

Rates of unmet need for family planning remain high in developing countries, according to a recently released report from the U.S.-based Guttmacher Institute.1 According to surveys, one in seven married women in these countries has an unmet need for contraception. But in sub-Saharan Africa, the ratio is nearly one in four.

Women with “unmet need for family planning” are women of reproductive age who prefer to avoid or postpone childbearing, but are not using any method of contraception. Since the 1960s, when the concept was first developed, addressing unmet need has become the basis for many family planning and population programs around the world

For full article, visit:
http://www.prb.org/Articles/2007/UnmetNeed.aspx

Participatory Assessment of Gugar Goge, an Entertainment-Education: A Qualitative Assessment Report
by Arvind Singhal, Sarah Hurlburt, and Radha Vij

This report documents the results of a participatory assessment exercise conducted in Nigeria to gauge audience reception of Gugar Goge (”Tell It To Me Straight”), an entertainment-education radio soap opera that sought to promote education for girls, the delay of marriage and pregnancies, and the adoption of family planning and maternal health services. The assessment exercise, which used participatory sketching and participatory photography, aimed to assess how frequent listeners engaged with the radio programme, and how they derived personal meanings from its plot, characters, and educational messages.

For full article, visit:
http://www.comminit.com/en/node/269041/304

Lurking behind almost every global development and survivability issue is a question that has been in the shadows for too long. Simply put, it is whether – despite the assurances of some leading demographers – the world is heading toward the moment when people will irrevocably outstrip the resources needed to sustain life and the environment.

The optimists who look at declining fertility figures – that’s the average number of births per woman – foresee population growth coming naturally under control in poor countries as well as industrial societies. Other experts, struggling to raise awareness of the need for a new global family planning push, say this may be missing the point. Population growth, and mostly in the poorest countries, will continue for generations before there can be hope of a global decline. By then, how many people will the planet be trying to support?

For full article, visit:
http://www.unausa.org

PMC was recently featured in The Environmental Magazine. Below is a PDF file of the article (PMC is featured on page 31 under the heading “Taught By TV”)

Destination America - Immigration, the Environment and Big Population Numbers (PDF, 1,514 KB)