The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the British government today (World Population Day) have been hosting a London Summit on Family Planning, aimed at expanding access to contraception and related health services for women, particularly in poor urban communities, who want more control over the size of their families. (More on the meeting goals is here. You can track or review the discussion via the Twitter tag #FPsummit.)  I heard about the conference today in an e-mail from Robert J. Walker, the president of the Washington-based Population Institute, which is excerpted below as a “Your Dot” offering.  Not surprisingly, the conference was attacked in advance by groups opposing contraception and abortion. In its newsletter, the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute charged that the Gates goal is to build a multi-billion-dollar war chest for programs that would take away, through “population control,” a woman’s right to have babies. In its piece, the group noted, “Even Amnesty International fears the campaign will ‘return to coercive family planning programs.’”  The group, practicing extremely selective quotation, failed to note that Amnesty International also said:  Contraceptive information and services – ‘family planning’ – form an essential part of the health services that women need throughout their lives.  The group dismisses the idea that there is substantial “unmet need” for family planning among women in many poor countries with the same definitiveness used by folks proclaiming risky human-driven climate change is a “hoax.” In fact, as with climate, there are real issues related to spin and the realities of the scientific and economic research, but there is also strong evidence for a real problem deserving a response.  Melinda Gates, in a CNN interview a few days ago, described how she reconciles her own Catholic faith with her activism on family planning: “Part of what I do with the (Gates) Foundation comes from that incredible social justice I had growing up and belief that all lives, all lives are of equal value.” There’s more from her in an “Impatient Optimists” blog post. Here’s a Gates Foundation video laying out her argument (followed by more on “unmet need” research and Walker’s population thoughts):  If you want to learn more, I suggest paying less attention to activist newsletters and instead read an invaluable discussion of the research and rhetoric on access to family planning accompanying “Is there an ‘unmet need’ for birth control,” a 2011 blog post by Berk Ozler, a World Bank development economist.  The comment string includes substantial input from Lant Pritchett, a Harvard development economist who’s been embraced by anti-contraception groups for challenging the extent and significance of the family planning gap.  The working assumption always seems to be that population growth is a “given,” and that world population will be 9 billion by 2050 and there’s nothing that can or will be done about it. Projected population growth, however, is just a projection. It’s not a prediction. (Demographers are loath to make predictions). To the extent that demographers talk about the assumptions underlying the UN medium variant, which now shows world population reaching 9 billion, by 2042, there’s a growing consensus that the assumptions may prove too optimistic (i.e. population may grow more rapidly than projected). Reasons for this vary, but it includes declining donor nation assistance for family planning over the past 17 years, a variety of cultural factors (e.g. prevalence of child marriage, male opposition, and misconceptions about the dangers of contraception). For more about the population projections, see this Woodrow Wilson Center discussion.  In particular, listen to the comments made by Carl Haub, the senior demographer at the Population Reference Bureau:  “It has been – I guess conventional is a good word – to assume that birth rates are going to come down the way they did in the rich countries,” Haub noted.  But there has been a “stall” for many developing countries, which he suggests is caused by fast initial uptake from urban women followed by much slower uptake by rural women. These dynamics, however, are relatively new and therefore are not always well incorporated into current projections.  On the other hand, population projections are extremely sensitive to changes in fertility. If the total fertility rate, the average number of children that a woman has in her lifetime, falls by even half a child, the impact on the long run projections is enormous.  Many of the challenges that we face (hunger, severe poverty, energy, food, carbon emissions) are seemingly intractable. Population growth, which is a challenge multiplier, is not intractable. Far from it. There are proven highly cost-effective means of lowering fertility rates: providing access to contraceptives, keeping girls in school, ending child marriage practices, and changing social norms (including attitudes toward women and desired family size) through entertainment media.  And that’s why the Family Planning Summit in London is BIG. If its goal of providing family planning services to 120 million more women in the developing world is met, the payoff would be enormous at multiple levels: lower maternal and child mortality, better health, higher educational attainment, poverty reduction, greater food and water security. It would even contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation.  With the world on the verge of another food crisis (corn, wheat, and soybean prices are soaring again), extreme weather patterns becoming more pronounced, carbon emissions on the rise, loss of biodiversity accelerating, we desperately need some “win-win” strategies in our quest to make the world more sustainable. Family planning is exactly that.  I hope you will devote some attention to the London Summit. Here’s my Huffington Post blog on the subject.
A look at ways to ensure women have the right and capacity to have the family size they desire.