Smart family planning improves women's health and cuts poverty

By Lester R Brown, founder and president of Earth Policy Institute for the Guardian.

When it comes to population growth, the United Nations has three primary projections. The medium projection, the one most commonly used, has world population reaching 9.2 billion by 2050. The high one reaches 10.5 billion. The low projection, which assumes that the world will quickly move below replacement-level fertility, has population peaking at 8 billion in 2042 and then declining.

If the goal is to eradicate poverty, hunger, and illiteracy, then we have little choice but to strive for the lower projection.

Slowing world population growth means ensuring that all women who want to plan their families have access to family planning information and services. Unfortunately, this is currently not the case for 215 million women, 59% of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent.

These women and their families represent roughly 1 billion of the earth's poorest people, for whom unintended pregnancies and unwanted births are an enormous burden.

Former US Agency for International Development (USAID) official J Joseph Speidel notes that "if you ask anthropologists who live and work with poor people at the village level … they often say that women live in fear of their next pregnancy. They just do not want to get pregnant."

The United Nations Population Fund and the Guttmacher Instituteestimate that meeting the needs of these 215 million women who lack reproductive healthcare and effective contraception could each year prevent 53 million unwanted pregnancies, 24 million induced abortions, and 1.6 million infant deaths.

Along with the provision of additional condoms needed to prevent HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, a universal family planning and reproductive health programme would cost an additional $21bn in funding from industrial and developing countries.

Shifting to smaller families brings generous economic dividends. In Bangladesh, for example, analysts concluded that $62 spent by the government to prevent an unwanted birth saved $615 in expenditures on other social services. For donor countries, ensuring that men and women everywhere have access to the services they need would yield strong social returns in improved education and healthcare.

Slowing population growth brings with it what economists call the demographic bonus. When countries move quickly to smaller families, growth in the number of young dependents – those who need nurturing and educating – declines relative to the number of working adults.

At the individual level, removing the financial burden of large families allows more people to escape from poverty. At the national level, thedemographic bonus causes savings and investment to climb, productivity to surge and economic growth to accelerate.

Japan, which cut its population growth in half between 1951 and 1958, was one of the first countries to benefit from the demographic bonus. South Korea and Taiwan followed, and more recently China, Thailand and Vietnam have been helped by earlier sharp reductions in birth rates.

Although this effect lasts for only a few decades, it is usually enough to launch a country into the modern era. Indeed, except for a few oil-rich countries, no developing country has successfully modernised without slowing population growth.

For full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global development/2011/apr/14/smart-family-planning-reduces-poverty

This article is adapted from Chapter 11, Eradicating Poverty, Stabilizing Population, and Rescuing Failing States, in Lester R Brown (2011),World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse (New York: W W Norton & Company), available online