Many thanks to Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura for the attached article in the June 2009 issue of The Psychologist. The article describes the work of Population Media Center. Dr. Bandura is a member of PMC’s Program Advisory Board.

Social Cognitive Theory Goes Global (PDF, 92 KB)

http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Opposition to contraception is hurting the Philippines. Each year, more than half of the 3.4 million pregnancies in the country are unplanned, resulting in high costs to women, their families and the national health care system. In addition, this very high rate of unintended pregnancy is impeding the Philippine’s development goals.

Yet this is not an epidemic for which there is no known solution. Unintended pregnancies are highly preventable if women have access to voluntary family planning information and services, particularly modern methods of contraception.

For full article, visit:
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/views-and-analysis

Ask 46-year-old Erlinda Cristobal (real name concealed by request) how many children she has.
“Ten,” she said.

“But I was supposed to have only six,” she snapped in a breath.

After the sixth pregnancy, Cristobal decided that she and her husband, a casual laborer who earns an average of four dollars a day, should not have any more children.

“My husband doesn’t have a stable job. There are days when we don’t eat so that our children can,” she told Xinhua in an interview near her residence in Manila.

For full article, visit:
http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=461829&publicationSubCategoryId=200

PMC was recently featured in Earth Island Journal
http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/sex_sells/

Sex Sells: A Tiny Nonprofit Uses Mass Media to Encourage Family Planning

Fikrite is a girl in trouble. Her grandfather has just died and now a neighbor, a man named Damte, has taken over the house and is trying to turn the place into a bar and brothel. Fikrite says she won’t allow it, so Damte starts spreading rumors about the girl and soon everyone, including her boyfriend, thinks that she is hiding a child born out of wedlock. Damte then seduces Fikrite’s stepsister, Lamrot, gets her hooked on booze and drugs, and knocks her up. When Lamrot tries to abort the pregnancy, she almost bleeds to death and lands in the hospital, where she finds out that she is HIV-positive.

If this sounds like overcooked melodrama – well, that’s the point. The story comes from “Yeken Kignit” (“Looking Over One’s Life”), a radio soap opera that gripped much of Ethiopia for 257 episodes beginning in 2002. The show had all of the elements that make serial dramas popular: sex, romance, mischief, betrayal, suspense. But the wildly successful program – which reached more than one half of Ethiopian adults during its two-year run and sparked a craze for naming baby girls Fikrite – wasn’t designed just for entertainment. Produced by a small US organization called the Population Media Center (PMC), the show was written with the express purpose of encouraging family planning, women’s empowerment, and HIV/AIDS awareness. Not all the listeners knew this, however, and that was also the point.
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Many thanks to Kurt Dahl for this article. Also see Kurt’s home page http://www.populationelephant.com/ for a lot of useful information on population issues.
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Ask any population activist, or any journalist who has ever written a story about world population, and they will tell you that by the year 2050 world population will grow to 9.2 billion people. This singularly quoted 9.2 billion number comes from the United Nations - specifically; the 2006 revision of the World Population Prospects done by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division - and it is accepted by all as the only authentic projection of world population.

Well…maybe not by all, because I believe that the real number, when we arrive at 2050, will be much higher, more likely in the 11 - 13 billion range.

For full article, visit:
http://www.populationelephant.com/PEnumbersarticle.html

Population Media Center’s Talk Show Project is generating many requests for interviews on population issues. You can listen over the air or online to the following programs. Please forward this list to your friends and colleagues as well. All times given are Eastern Time (US). Engaging and educating the public, opinion leaders and decision makers is crucial for sustainable population advocates.
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Thanks to Vicky Markham for this letter published by the New York Times.
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There are many advantages to President Obama’s recent actions on family planning: They will help women of all incomes control their fertility. They will provide better education, economic, resource-use and family-raising opportunities. And they will help prevent abortions and unwanted pregnancies.

For full article, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/opinion/lweb28family.html?_r=2&ref=opinion

Thanks to Toby Aykroyd for this article.
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There are already too many people living on Planet Earth, according to one of most influential science advisors in the US government.

Nina Fedoroff told the BBC One Planet programme that humans had exceeded the Earth’s “limits of sustainability”. Dr Fedoroff has been the science and technology advisor to the US secretary of state since 2007, initially working with Condoleezza Rice. Under the new Obama administration, she now advises Hillary Clinton. “We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can’t support many more people,” Dr Fedoroff said, stressing the need for humans to become much better at managing “wild lands”, and in particular water supplies. Pressed on whether she thought the world population was simply too high, Dr Fedoroff replied: “There are probably already too many people on the planet.”

For full article, visit:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7974995.stm

Thanks to Kathlene Carney for this article from the Sacramento Examiner.
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Can soap operas change the world?

They already are according to the Population Media Center (PMC) based in Shelburne, Vermont. Since 1998, PMC’s serialized radio and television dramas have been improving the health and well-being of audiences around the globe.

The shows use “entertainment education” strategies to influence social norms of the audience, much of which is from the global south. Characters evolve into role models who practice gender equity, safe sex and responsible family planning.

For full article, visit:
http://www.examiner.com

PMC was recently featured in an issue of The Bridge (a weekly newspaper based in Montpelier, Vermont). PMC was highlighted in their ‘Speaking Out’ supplement that dealt with the sometimes overlooked public issue, population growth.

http://www.montpelierbridge.com/Population%20Insert.htm