The Facts:

Scores of women around the world are unable to obtain family planning services, including birth control. Yet, these very services can save their lives.

Globally:

• More than 200 million women worldwide wish to delay or end childbearing but do not have access to modern and effective contraceptives. (Population Action International)
• The difference between access to family planning care among the rich versus the poor is staggering. For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, “women in the richest fifth of the population are five times more likely to have access to and use contraception than women in the poorest fifth.”
• In many countries, family planning services are often not available, inaccessible, or unaffordable. In one study, only 14 out of 88 evaluated countries provided women with routine reproductive health care at a reasonable cost.
• In many developing countries, the need for birth control far exceeds the available supply. Over the past 40 years, use of birth control has grown from 10 percent of couples to nearly 60 percent. The number of contraceptive users is projected to grow by more than 40 percent in the next decade as a result of population growth and increased use of birth control.
• Meeting the global need for family planning could prevent the following:
• 23 million unplanned births (a 72% reduction)
• 22 million induced abortions (a 64% reduction)
• 1.4 million infant deaths
• 142,000 pregnancy related-deaths (including 53,000 from unsafe abortions)
• 505,000 children losing their mothers due to pregnancy related-deaths
• One in four infant deaths could be averted if women had access to contraception that enabled them to space births by at least 36 months.

In the United States:

• 62 million American women are in their reproductive years, between the ages of 15 to 44. Seven out of 10 of these women are sexually active and do not want to become pregnant. Eighty-nine percent are using a method of birth control.
• 75% of the drop in teen pregnancies during the early 1990’s was attributed to improved contraceptive use.
• “In 2002, almost 17 million women needed publicly supported contraceptive care – a number which grew by 400,000 alone between 2000 and 2002 due to a rising uninsured population.”
• The nation’s only federal program solely devoted to the provision of reproductive health care services—Title X—provides 5 million low-income women (who do not have insurance and cannot qualify for Medicaid) access to family planning and other services such as cervical and breast cancer screenings each year. An estimated 17 million women are in need of these services.
• Americans overwhelmingly support access to contraception, along with the belief that access to and education about contraception will help decrease the rate of abortion.
• Medicaid is also growing as a source for publicly-funded family planning serving millions of women each year. Funding for reproductive health care and supplies has grown under this program from $100 million in the early 1980’s to $770 million in 2001.

What can be done:

Globally:

• ICPD Programme of Action: At the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), 179 governments pledged to make reproductive health care universally available “as soon as possible and no later than 2015.”
• Supply Initiative: The Supply Initiative works to raise awareness “…about the drastic shortage of contraceptive supplies in the developing world and its impact on public health...”
• Millennium Development Goals:“The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)…form a blueprint agreed to by all the world’s countries and all the world’s leading development institutions. They have galvanized unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world’s poorest.” Access to reproductive health services is integral to meeting them.

In the United States:

• Healthy People 2010:“Healthy People 2010 is a comprehensive set of disease prevention and health promotion objectives…it identifies a wide range of public health priorities and includes family planning.”
• Reproductive Health Technologies Project:“Founded on the belief that politics — more than science or economics — prevents new and improved products from entering the market as well as limits women’s knowledge of and access to technologies, RHTP works to ensure that new technologies are developed and introduced with appropriate safeguards, a well-informed consumer constituency, and broad-based public and policy support”

Expert Resources:

Guttmacher Institute

NFPRHA

Planned Parenthood Federation of America

Population Action International

Reproductive Health Technologies Project

Supply Initiative

UNFPA

Office of Population Affairs – Office of Family Planning