Population Connection

The Huber Foundation Continues Longtime Support of Population Connection

2010-08-19T15:49:00.004-04:00

By Natalie Widel, Development Associate

The Huber Foundation has supported Population Connection for nearly thirty years. This year, the Foundation contributed a $250,000 grant toward our ongoing program activities to stabilize population growth. This generous gift will enhance our education and advocacy efforts, which are part of Population Connection’s campaign to make population integral to the national discourse on environmental protection and reproductive/human rights.

Population Connection’s Population Education program reaches over three million students every year with fact-based curricula focused on population trends and their effects on people and our planet. Additional funding allows us to expand our volunteer teacher-trainer network through national workshops and staff visits to regions with large concentrations of interested teachers. We currently benefit from the in-kind contributions of more than 420 professional educators. These educators provide additional teachers with the training and materials necessary to teach students in kindergarten through twelfth grade about population growth in their classrooms.

Additionally, the Huber Foundation’s support assists our Government Relations and Grassroots staff working in three target congressional swing districts. As part of our “Double the Money” campaign, we seek to convince voters and members of Congress to support an increase in U.S. assistance for international family planning programs to $1 billion annually. Thanks to the Huber Foundation’s sizeable grant, Population Connection will be able to reach key constituents in these three target districts with the message that population stabilization is critical to solving many global challenges.

If you would like information about making a major gift to Population Connection, please contact Shauna Scherer, Major Gifts Manager, at sscherer@popconnect.org.

House Panel Approves Big Increase for International Family Planning

2010-07-01T12:05:00.001-04:00

By Brian Dixon

Yesterday, the House State-Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee, led by Chairwoman Nita Lowey (D-NY), approved $735 million for international family planning programs in 2011 – an $86.5 million, or 13 percent, increase over the current funding level.

It is also nearly $20 million more than President Obama requested. This commitment to family planning is very welcome and is especially impressive given the fact that the overall funding for international affairs is $4 billion less than the President sought.

We are, however, disappointed that the bill does not include a provision that would prevent the future imposition of the odious Global Gag Rule. Ninety-one House members, led by Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY), sent a letter to Chairwoman Lowey urging her to include this language in the bill. Without this provision, it is likely that the new resources will not be used as effectively as they could. The threat of a future reinstatement of the Global Gag Rule is causing many aid officials to avoid making grants to organizations – among the most experienced and effective family planning providers in the world – that may be disqualified again in just a few years.

The Senate is not expected to consider their version of the bill for several more weeks. We will urge the Senate to support similar funding levels for family planning programs, and to again include a permanent end to the Global Gag Rule in their version of the bill, as they did last year.

We will continue to follow the appropriations process as it unfolds, and we will keep you up to date on how you can help.

Women Deliver a Strong Message to Congress

2010-06-11T11:43:00.004-04:00

By Brian Dixon, Vice President for Media and Government Relations

The Women Deliver conference was held in Washington, DC this week, bringing more than 3,500 people from 140+ countries together to focus on the desperate need to improve reproductive health and family planning access around the world.

The culmination of this event was Thursday’s Lobby Day. I spent the day as a “team leader,” meaning I made sure that three very impressive people from outside the United States could get around the Capitol complex to tell their stories to American legislators. My team consisted of the Honorable Saudatu Sani, one of the few female members of Nigeria’s House of Representatives; Dr. Nehemiah Kimathi, the director of the Safe Motherhood program for the International Planned Parenthood Federation Africa Region in Nairobi, Kenya; and Dr. Monica Jasis, who runs a program to improve adolescent reproductive health in Mexico.

It’s easy to get tired and frustrated by the seemingly endless debate about family planning and abortion that takes place in the United States. Hearing the stories of these people, who face challenges every day that Americans can barely even consider, makes clear how important this work really is. In Nigeria, and indeed in much of sub-Saharan Africa, stock outs of contraceptives are common. In Mexico, abortion opponents are encouraging doctors to breach medical privacy and denounce to the police women and girls they think might have had an unsafe, illegal abortion--making it less likely that these girls and women will seek urgent care in the case of such an abortion or even in the case of a miscarriage.

Their stories are important to share with members of the United States Congress. They need to hear what it's really like. Few have witnessed the often dire conditions in the developing world. Few have spoken to people from overseas who, while having no say in American politics, can have their lives turned upside down by what happens here in the U.S. For example, it is women served by the clinics overseen by Dr. Kimathi who are hurt by the imposition of the Global Gag Rule, and it is the constituents of Rep. Sani who lose out when the United States refuses to support the work of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). American officials and, indeed, American voters need to understand that what happens here has massive effects everywhere, and that it's time to invest in women. It pays.

Population Connection Earth Day Address

2010-04-20T17:02:00.002-04:00

The following are comments by Population Connection President John Seager, at the University of Wisconsin

“If the world population continues to increase at the same rate, we will destroy the species.”

These are the words of Nobel Peace Laureate Norman Borlaug. He died last year at the age of 95. His agricultural research saved hundreds of millions of people from starvation.

He received that Nobel Prize in 1970, the same year that Senator Gaylord Nelson initiated the first Earth Day. Back then, the world’s population was growing by about 75 million people per year. Today, some 40 years later, it is growing by even more.

Now, we’ve made progress since 1970—and since 1968 when Stanford University’s Dr. Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, which led to the creation of our group, then called Zero Population Growth, now Population Connection. The rate of population growth has halved since 1970—from 2% to 1.1%.

Then and now, Dr. Ehrlich was a scientist, not a soothsayer. And he did what all good scientists do, which is to develop a theory or thesis based upon the available data.

Since then, the world has continued to change. And the attention that Dr. Ehrlich drew to population growth has helped to change that world—just as the attention Sen. Nelson drew to the environment helped to change our world—in both cases for the better.

But environmental challenges persist. And new ones have surfaced over the past 40 years.

When it comes to population growth, many claim that the problem is behind us. The facts at hand show this is not the case.

Every day we add more than 200,000 people to the world population just as we did back in 1970. That’s roughly equal to another Madison every single day, another Milwaukee every three days.

Virtually all of this population growth occurs in the poorest places on earth, places when one billion people struggle to survive on less than one dollar day.

They are poor. And they are hungry. For most of them hunger is not a passing sensation but a constant daily reality. Some stave off their hunger by eating dirt biscuits, a concoction made mostly from, yes, dirt, which at least provides the sensation of fullness without any much-needed nourishment.

Consider the words of a man from Bedsa, Egypt who said, “Lack of work worries me. My children were hungry and I told them the rice is cooking, until they fell asleep from hunger."

Throughout these forty years, we’ve seen an argument, if you will, played out over and over. On one side are those who seek to raise the alarm about the consequences of rapid population growth. On the other side are those who contend technology will surmount this problem.

Will that happen? Will technology alone save the day? Dr. Borlaug didn’t think so. In his Nobel acceptance speech he warned of the consequences of rapid population growth.

Maybe the day will arrive when advances in agricultural technology will solve the global hunger crisis. But that day is not today. Today is the day that hundreds of millions of people will go to bed hungry. And they will get up tomorrow morning hungry. Today is the day that thousands of children will die from hunger-related causes.

Some contend that there is plenty of food to go around, that it’s just a distribution problem. I guess the same can be said of wealth. Here in the U.S., the per capita income is about $47,000 per year. Worldwide it’s about $8,000. So, by that line of reasoning, all we need to do is share the wealth as it were. Slash our incomes by 80% to about $8,000, share the rest, and voila, problem solved. To quote the great comedic author P. G. Wodehouse, that contingency seems remote. In the real world, in today’s world, people in sub-Saharan Africa survive on less than $1,000 year, on average. In others words their annual income is about the same as the weekly income in the U.S. In many parts of Africa it is far worse than that. In the Congo it’s less than $300 year. Does anyone think that people can meet all their needs for food, clothing, shelter, health care, education and all the rest on a dollar day? Well that’s what one billion of us must do. Incidentally it’s not that money goes farther in poor places. The economists use something called Purchasing Power Parity to equalize the value of goods, so for one billion of us it’s just like trying to survive in Madison on less than one dollar a day. Not a dollar a day, less than dollar a day.

What does the future hold? According to UN population projections, not predictions, projections, by 2050 the world population, which now stands at more than 6.8 billion will increase to somewhere between 8 and 11 billion people. Let’s consider the spread in those numbers. The difference between the high and low projections is three billion. So, in a world which already has one billion or more hungry people, we must figure out how to feed them, plus feed somewhere between an additional one billion and four billion additional people.

The range in population projections by 2050, which is three billion, is the same as the total world population was in 1960. It’s equal to the population today of the entire world except Asia. That’s what’s in play, about three billion people.

So depending on what we do or do not do, on what happens over the next 40 years, we may have the additional challenge of feeding another North America, Central America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Australia. Or we may not.

So what can we do?

Population growth is the only global challenge I know of where the following three things are all true.

We know the solution;
It’s relatively inexpensive;
Women everywhere want it.

A big part of the solution involves money, and, relatively speaking, not much of it. For years, Congress and then-President Bush dragged their heels, placing obstacles such as the Global Gag Rule in the way and slashing U.S. funds for family planning.

Times have changed. President Obama rescinded the Global Gag Rule. He restored funding for UN family planning programs. Last year, thanks to President Obama and to a majority in Congress, we saw a 40% increase in funds for international family planning.
According to the Global Health Council, this increase of $180 million will result in:

1.6 million fewer unplanned births;
1.4 million fewer abortions;
110,000 fewer Infant deaths.

And it will save the lives of more than 6,000 mothers—enabling them to help take care of their families and, hopefully, to live productive lives.

And that’s all in a single year. And all for about 60 cents per year for each person in the U.S.
So, money matters. And Congress holds the purse strings.

Some year ago, Dr. Joel Cohen of Rockefeller University researched and wrote a book with the title How Many People Can the Earth Support? In it he reviewed every study of the subject conducted over the past 400 years. After much work, he arrived at the reasoned conclusion that there is no answer to the question. Or rather the answer lies in two other questions. How do we wish to live? And how do we want others to live?

As Dr. Cohen put it:

“The real issue with population is not just numbers of people, although numbers matter and statistics give us quantitative insight and prevent us from making fools of ourselves. The real crux of the population question is the quality of people’s lives; the ability of people to participate in what it means to be really human; to work, play and die with dignity; to have some sense that one’s life has meaning and is connected with other people’s lives. That, to me, is the essence of the population problem.”

We no longer have the luxury of focusing on “one big thing” whether it’s climate change or food production or biodiversity. If not expert, we must all become knowledgeable, about areas outside our own disciplines. We must get outside our own comfort zones. We must look beyond the borders of our gardens, our towns, our cities, our states, and our nation. As Sen. Nelson understood so well, we simply cannot afford to avoid challenges simply because they are too big, too controversial, too complex, too far away. To quote an old recycling maxim, there is no longer an “away” to throw things, nor is there an “away” to stow problems. Everything is right here. And everything is right now. Our actions can and will create a better, safer, less-crowded world. But only if we choose to learn, only if we choose to act.

Thank you.

The Mary Wohlford Foundation Contributes to Population Connection’s Grassroots Outreach

2010-03-30T13:29:00.003-04:00

By Shauna Scherer, Major Gifts Manager

The Mary Wohlford Foundation renewed its support of Population Connection this year with a $30,000 commitment. This grant will fund two grassroots fellows who will work alongside field and outreach staff to build constituencies supportive of progressive domestic and international population policies. Alexis Katzelnick-Wise, a graduate of George Mason University with a Master’s degree in Political Science and International Relations, has been selected to serve as the first fellow for 2010.

The Mary Wohlford Foundation’s continuing support allows Population Connection to develop grassroots advocacy skills among young leaders who can positively affect public opinion about women’s reproductive rights and access to contraception. This year’s fellows will play an integral role in building momentum for Population Connection’s Double the Money campaign, which urges Congress to increase the United States’ investment in international family planning aid to $1 billion a year.

The path to a stable population is direct: universal access to affordable, modern family planning services. Yet more than 215 million women worldwide have no access to birth control despite their desire to limit or delay pregnancies. By raising the United States’ share of family planning aid to $1 billion, women and men will receive reproductive health services fundamental to their health and the health of our planet.

For every $100 million invested in international family planning programs:

3.6 million more contraceptive users will be added,
2.1 million unintended pregnancies will be avoided,
825,000 fewer abortions will occur,
70,000 infant deaths will be averted, and
4,000 women will not die in childbirth.

With world population projected to climb to seven billion in 2011, Population Connection is intensifying efforts to raise awareness and educate the public about the detrimental consequences of such rapid population growth. If you would like to become an active voice in your community, please contact Rebecca Harrington, National Field Coordinator, at rharrington@popconnect.org.

If you would like to receive information about making a major gift to Population Connection, please contact Shauna Scherer, Major Gifts Manager, at sscherer@popconnect.org.

Book Review: The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050

2010-03-16T13:01:00.029-04:00

By Marian Starkey

Joel Kotkin, author of The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, quotes, "Growth is like toothpaste. Squeezed out of one location, it must go somewhere else." America, it turns out, is that somewhere else. And, according to him, we are lucky that that is the case.

Kotkin predicts that America's relatively high population growth, heavily bolstered by immigration and the descendants of immigrants, will be the magic bullet that will make our economy the strongest in the world, outperforming the aging and shrinking countries of Europe and Eastern Asia. The United States is comparatively welcoming to new immigrants, and second-generation immigrants are much better integrated into American life than their European and Asian counterparts, who tend to live and work in ethnic enclaves and maintain the traditions of their countries or origin.

Without the fear mongering that typically accompanies this discussion, Kotkin states that the U.S. will no longer be a "white country" in 2050. In other words, the United States will be a "majority-minority" country. Because of rapid assimilation, this trend should be welcomed because after a generation or two, immigrants are just as "American" as Americans whose families have lived here for hundreds of years.

Kotkin postulates that the other phenomenon that contributes to higher population growth in the United States is Americans' elevated level of religiosity. In Europe and East Asia, only one in ten young adults belong to an organized religion. By contrast, 60% of Americans believe that religion is "very important" and 75% young Americans consider their religious views important. The author concedes that, "In all countries including the United States, growing affluence and mass education have a dampening effect on people’s willingness to have children." However, he says education and wealth have affected childbearing to a much lesser extent in the U.S., largely due to the fact that religious people everywhere tend to have more children than nonbelievers.

Not mentioned, is the fact that half of all pregnancies and a third of all births are unintended in this country. Far be it for government to dictate how many children couples should have. The government could, however, play a larger role in educating Americans about reproduction and pregnancy prevention so that more pregnancies, and especially pregnancies to teens, could be better timed, i.e. later. Many European countries are experiencing zero population growth largely because teenagers and young adults understand how reproduction works and have easy access to the education and services they need to prevent an unwanted pregnancy. Of course the author doesn't mention that these unplanned teen pregnancies usually have negative socio-economic and health outcomes for both the mothers and the babies, detracting from his "high population growth equals strong economic growth theory."

Kotkin outlines the changes that will be necessary in urban planning and commuting trends in order to accommodate another hundred million inhabitants in the next forty years. He dismisses as snobbish the distaste urbanites have for the suburbs with the fact that, actually, most people in this country prefer to live in the 'burbs (the so-called "nurseries for the nation") for the green space and affordability they offer. And survey data show that one in three Americans would like to live in a rural area but do not do so for lack of professional jobs. With the rising popularity of telecommuting and businesses forming or relocating to peri-urban outposts to save money, fulfilling peoples' desire to live the simple life may not be such a distant dream.

He accepts that Americans are addicted to driving and that many would not use public transit even if it were convenient and affordable. Therefore, according to him, building more urban villages centered around subway stations is probably not the answer. Developing suburban communities centered around jobs and recreation opportunities, however, is the best possible solution. At least the people who would drive to work and the grocery store no matter what, would be driving shorter distances.

I like Kotkin's optimism, and agree that many Americans won't live in high-density cities regardless of how convenient and culturally stimulating they are. His idealism sometimes gets in the way of facts though: he exemplifies Los Angeles as the modern, commuter-friendly city of the future. That's a bit backward since LA consistently rates worst for traffic in national data analyses. The wide variety of neighborhoods spread out over vast acreage does not necessarily mean that people are able to afford to live in those neighborhoods that are closest to their jobs.

His hypothesis does make some sense if all we care about is fitting people inside the country's borders. If people can live and work in suburbia or in rural America, currently undeveloped land can absorb the excess population of the next four decades...

...But only if we don't mind tearing up the green space and wildlife habitats that make living on the edges of suburbia so attractive to so many Americans. “As urbanized regions become even more crowded and expensive, and as new technologies emerge, more and more Americans will find their best future in the wide open spaces that, even in 2050, will still exist across the continent.” It's anyone's guess how long those wide open spaces would exist beyond 2050 if we exploit them to the extent that Kotkin suggests.

He takes shots at environmentalists and "aesthetes" for caring more about nature and its beauty than people and their happiness. He doesn't agree with conserving nature for nature's sake. Rather, he believes that people are entitled to carve up the land however they wish, as long as it makes their lives more comfortable and lucrative.

Since persistent land development is inevitable as long as the population continues to grow, and much of the fertility-dependent population growth in this country is actually an economic burden due to the social programs it necessitates, rather than a boon to the economy in the form of educated workers, I still vote for stabilizing population in the United States.

There are a lot of reasons that the United States should welcome documented immigrants. But the U.S. should also help developing countries slow population growth through family planning assistance so that there isn't as much "toothpaste" to be squeezed. Whether here or "there," population growth places demands on infrastructure and the environment that no amount of urban planning can counterbalance.

*New* Here's an interview with the author, in which he explains why he thinks the U.S. can sustain high population growth.

Book Review: Second Nature

2010-03-03T10:55:00.031-05:00

By Marian Starkey

Jonathan Balcombe, PhD--Population Connection member and animal behavioralist--sent me a copy of his new book, Second Nature, as soon as it was printed. I only wish I had gotten it a few weeks earlier so that I could have reviewed it for the last issue of The Reporter, which focused on animals and the ways in which human population growth impacts them.

The book was so interesting and accessible that I almost felt guilty reading it at work. Dr. Balcombe provides entertaining anecdotes and objective research results that reveal the magnificent sentience of so many species that we often think of as operating on survival autopilot.

We learn that bats and chimps will share their food if they realize that others in their group are going without; that zebras will only travel as fast as their slowest member is able to go (debunking the myth that injured or old animals are always left to die in the wild); and that many animals will nurse an orphaned baby of their same species even though there is no genetic advantage to them doing so.

Other examples of animal emotiveness abound: A whale showed gratitude when divers untangled it from fishing ropes, nuzzling each diver individually afterward. Elephants expressed grief over the death of another elephant, but also showed remorse over the death of a human keeper that they accidentally killed. A dog refused to do tricks when he realized that the dog next to him was being rewarded with food for doing tricks and he was not (he understood that the situation was unfair).

If this book were just a collection of funny, interesting, and sometimes heart-rending animal stories, I wouldn't be reviewing it here (although I would still read it on my own for pleasure). But since Dr. Balcombe dedicated the last section of the book to the detrimental effects of human population growth for the animal kingdom, Second Nature is extremely relevant to our mission.

The author explains the concept of both human and animal carrying capacity--the biological limit to how many of a certain species can be sustained in a given area. He describes the ways that humans are the greatest contributing factor to the current Sixth Great Extinction of Species. And he convinces the reader that animals' lives are complex and valuable and worth saving.

He advocates for reducing (or even better, eliminating) meat consumption but does not preach or condescend. He also mentions lack of knowledge of family planning in the context of unsustainable population growth in the developing world. He stops short of advocating for increased funding for family planning or liberalized contraceptive laws. Such a stance would have been outside the scope of the book though, which is really meant to change the way we think about the other life on this planet and how humanity is not necessarily the pinnacle of evolution, deserving to destroy everything in its path for its own "advancement."

I highly recommend this book, but in case you don't get around to reading it, here are some population-relevant excerpts:

“Human population growth—and the concomitant increase in human consumption of resources—underlies some of the most serious problems faced by animals, including humans. Conventional wisdom holds that the planet is filled to capacity, and there isn’t room for any more consumers, human or nonhuman. When we add more, others have to make room. Which means that as the human population grows, other organisms are inevitably being pushed out.”

“It has been calculated that if twentieth-century rates of human population increase continued for the next thousand years, a mass of humanity would cover the earth shoulder to shoulder more than a million deep; another thousand years on and the mountain of humanity would be approaching the edge of the known universe, traveling outward at the speed of light. This imaginary scenario illustrates the inevitable link between economic growth and ecological sustainability. It also shows that any link between growth and a higher quality of (human) life is tenuous, and at best temporary. As long as economic models are defined by growth in consumption, ecosystems will increasingly feel the strain as more human consumers population the land, and as more resources get used up.”

“We can be certain that with more humans there will be fewer animals living free in the world. Animals need wild places to live, and we continue to take them away. Nearly half of all tropical rain forests worldwide have been destroyed for human use, and about one percent of what remains is being taken away each year.”

“Having more humans on earth does not improve the quality of life for humans, either. Human overpopulation has strong links to poverty and hunger (admittedly not new problems), pollution and climate change. In tropical regions, local population density has been directly correlated to the poverty status of the local people, most of whom lack an education in family planning. Human overpopulation is driving climate change through loss of trees and the burning of fossil fuels.

"These ills denote a self-centered ethic--an unwillingness to restrain ourselves. A paradigm shift in humanity's relationship to the planet and its other life forms requires the acknowledgment that growth is no longer a good thing. Chief among those things that need to stop growing is the human population.

"Today, however, addressing human overpopulation remains firmly off the public policy agenda. This is paradoxical when the problem either fosters or exacerbates so many of the challenges faced by modern societies: hunger, gridlock, habitat and biodiversity loss, water shortages, violent conflict. The idea that growth is progress is an anachronism that today serves only those relatively few who profit from another residential development and a longer line at the cash register."

"A New (and Improved) Abstinence Only?"

2010-02-02T15:01:00.014-05:00

By Stacie Murphy, Policy Associate

There’s a lot of talk in the press today about a new study indicating that there’s an abstinence-only program out there that appears to actually work. I have to admit, I did a double-take when I saw the headline. Really? One of those horrible, hectoring, having-sex-makes-you-as-appealing-as-a-spit-covered-sucker programs actually works?

Well, no, in fact. The new study examines a program that wouldn’t even have been eligible for funding under the Bush Administration guidelines (although, ironically, it appears that the new Obama Administration initiative would be willing to fund an effort like this one). Unlike traditional abstinence programs, this program didn’t tell students that they should wait until marriage, just that they should wait until they were really ready to deal with sex and its consequences. It didn’t talk about sex in a negative way and didn’t sermonize about the evils of all non-marital sex. It didn’t denigrate the effectiveness of condoms and contraception; on the contrary, teachers were instructed to correct such views if students offered them. The program focused instead on increasing students’ knowledge about HIV and other STIs, helping them to consider how early sex might interfere with their future goals, and teaching them how to resist pressure to have sex when they didn’t want to. And it seems like it worked: two years after completing the program, only a third of students had become sexually active, compared with half the students in the control group.

So am I an abstinence-only convert? Of course not (although I am a certified abstinence educator). I don’t doubt that a program like this one—straightforward, nonjudgmental, and truthful—could have a real impact for some kids. But I worry that the impact is limited—the kids in this program were between 12 and 14. Will a program that works for younger teens be as effective for 16 and 17-year olds? And what about the kids who aren’t convinced by the lessons? What about the kids who were already having sex when the program started? What about the one third of kids who had sex anyway after going through the program? Do they have access to the tools and information they need to make healthy decisions about their “post-abstinence” sexuality?

I’d argue that “later is better” is a perfectly appropriate message for teens, especially very young teens, to hear about sex—and one that many comprehensive sex education advocates have been including for years. But it can’t be the only message. If the price of convincing some to abstain is leaving others totally unprotected and ill-prepared, then we’ve failed.

Alarming Teen Pregnancy Rate Increase

2010-01-29T13:20:00.050-05:00

By Marian Starkey, Director of Communications

A new and disturbing trend in American teens' reproductive outcomes has been revealed this week with the publication of a Guttmacher Institute report. Researchers found that in 2006 the teen birth rate increased 4%, the teen pregnancy rate rose 3%, and the teen abortion rate went up 1%. Preliminary data for 2007 show the pregnancy rate increasing again.

The teen pregnancy rate in the United States peaked in 1990 at 12%, and has been dropping consistently every year since (although higher than in 2005, the 2006 rate was still only 7.15%, at 750,000 total teen pregnancies).

The biggest jump in teen pregnancies occurred among African American women. About 80% of teen pregnancies are unintended, with the rates being much higher for women of color. The fact that more black teens are accidentally getting pregnant shows that we are doing an insufficient job of reaching minority/disadvantaged teens with important pregnancy prevention information and services.

Among states with available data, the pregnancy rates for white teens were highest in Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Kentucky, West Virginia and Mississippi--southern states that favor abstinence-only education.

Many journalists and teen pregnancy-prevention workers have come out this week condemning the sex education approach of the Bush Administration. You'll find many of their articles linked on our website. Indeed, the rate of teen pregnancy decline slowed and then reversed during the Bush Administration. Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said “This new study makes it crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work.”

The federal government spent over $1.5 billion on abstinence-only sex education programs in the last decade. Studies have found that abstinence-only programs do not delay the age at which teens first have sex. Instead, students of "ab-only" programs are less likely to use contraception when they do become sexually active, due to the lies they've been fed about inflated failure rates, and lack of knowledge about where and how to obtain contraceptive methods. This quote from the Guttmacher report supports the theory that pregnancy rates are increasing due to lower rates of contraceptive use.

Recent research concluded that almost all of the decline in the pregnancy rate between 1995 and 2002 among 18-19-year-olds was attributable to increased contraceptive use. Among women aged 15–17, about one-quarter of the decline during the same period was attributable to reduced sexual activity and three-quarters to increased contraceptive use.

The Obama Administration has ended funding for abstinence-only programs and is currently launching a $110 million pregnancy prevention initiative, which will only fund programs that have been proven effective at reducing teen pregnancy.

This country gave abstinence-only programs a fair shot and they failed. It's time to move on to something more effective. Our teens are counting on the adults in their lives to educate them about safe sex. The only way to do that is with objective, medically-accurate information.

73 Members of Congress Urge Obama: Make Real Investment in Family Planning

2009-12-15T11:40:00.001-05:00

Late last week, 73 members of the House sent a letter to the White House urging the Obama administration to provide one billion dollars in funding for international family planning in his 2011 budget.

The letter highlights the many benefits that such an investment will bring: environmental security, political stability and maternal and child survival. Indeed, a recent report from UNFPA and the Guttmacher Institute makes clear that real investment in family planning is critical to making dramatic health improvements.

UNFPA also recently released its 2009 State of World Population Report making a compelling argument that increased funding for family planning around the world is a key component of both climate change mitigation and adaptation.

The congressional letter follows some very important progress. Over the weekend, both the House and Senate passed legislation to increase U.S. support for family planning around the world to $648 million – nearly a 40 percent increase from just two years ago, and more than a hundred million more than last year. This increase will allow more than 3.5 million more women to use contraceptives. But there are more than 200 million women who want to prevent or delay pregnancy but have no access to birth control, so much more needs to be done. That’s why we are encouraged by the strong support shown by Congress for real investment in family planning.

Appropriations Finale Brings Real Progress, and some Disappointment

2009-12-09T15:53:00.003-05:00

Late yesterday a House-Senate conference met and finalized a “minibus” appropriations bill for FY 2010.

All in all, the outcome is quite positive, with one big disappointment. First the bad news, the conference report does not include a provision – added to the Senate bill by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) -- that would prohibit a future president from unilaterally acting to reinstate the Global Gag Rule.

The good news is that the bill will provide $648 million for international family planning programs -- an increase of more than $100 million from the current level. Of that total, $55 million will be provided to UNFPA. In addition, the Labor/HHS/Education portion of the bill eliminates funding for Community Based Abstinence Education (CBAE) and provides $114 million for a new “evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention program” that will allow federal funding to be used for real sex education. Finally, the bill will repeal the long standing ban on the District of Columbia using local revenues to provide abortion services to low-income women.

Each of these is an important victory. The increased funding for international family planning programs will allow more than 3.5 million additional women to use contraceptives and will prevent more than 2 million unintended pregnancies. The shifting of funding from incomplete, abstinence-only to real teen pregnancy prevention means that American youth will finally be given the information they need to make healthy responsible decisions about sex, and will finally be told the truth about ways they can prevent unwanted pregnancy and the spread of sexually transmitted infections. And finally, the people of DC can make their own decision about the use of their own tax dollars for abortion services.

It seems that in the end, the gag rule issue got tangled up in the debate and discussion of domestic abortion and reproductive health politics and policies. The ongoing debates around the issues as they relate to health reform also played a role in the final outcome. It’s a reminder that members of congress don’t necessarily separate these issues in their own minds the way we do. We think of the gag rule as an issue of global access to family planning – to many of them, it’s just another abortion issue. Negotiators decided they could only pick so many fights on contentious issues, and the gag rule, to them, was one too many. I remain hopeful, however, that we can make a renewed push for this legislation in the coming months and that it can be passed into law in 2010.

Copenhagen Talks Not Just About Energy

2009-12-08T15:29:00.002-05:00

By John Seager

As world leaders convene the Copenhagen climate talks, discussion has focused on the need for wealthy countries to reduce emissions. Far less attention has been paid to the inevitable reality that emissions in the poorest parts of the world need to increase. And there has been scant recognition of the role played by rapid population growth in rising emissions worldwide.

President Obama is taking a bold first step in Copenhagen by putting forward an ambitious emissions target for the United States. Yet global population growth threatens to undercut - even cancel - all progress. Global population may grow by 18% or more from 2005 to 2020, according to UN projections.

Reducing carbon emissions is actually three separate but related challenges. First, we must reduce global emissions. Second, we must slow population growth by supporting programs such as voluntary family planning. Third, we must recognize that about half the world now suffers from "carbon starvation" and needs to increase emissions.

Historically, as population has increased, emissions have also risen. Most emissions reductions must occur in wealthier countries since that's where they are highest. At the same time, in order to give billions of poor people a reasonable quality of life, emissions in some parts of the world must increase significantly. Rapid population growth makes this balancing act even more difficult.

Given available technology, the often-tiny carbon footprints of billions of people are both a cause and an effect of impoverishment. The one billion people who struggle to survive on less than $1/day use very little in the way of fossil fuels. And the additional 1.6 billion living on less than $2/day hardly use more. In order to have decent lives, they must increase their emission levels substantially, despite advances in green technology.

Much of sub-Saharan Africa is mired in the most desperate, grinding poverty imaginable. Governments there are already unable to meet the most basic needs of their citizens. And it is these people - who contribute least to climate change - who will suffer most from the problems that climate change brings. Women especially will face new challenges to their health, livelihoods, and even their lives.

Africa's per-capita emissions must increase. But, if Africa's population grows by the 39% that is projected by 2020, it will be nearly impossible to create a healthy quality of life for people in that part of the world.

Population growth will undermine all efforts to achieve lower carbon emissions unless investments in clean energy are matched by equally comprehensive investments in universal access to contraception along with other health and development programs.

As we develop hybrid cars and the like, what about the other half of the world? Will they be left to sweat and starve while we glide forward into a century of renewable energy? Their carbon footprint needs to grow. That can only work if we are willing to meet the population growth challenge.

This is one of those times - and one of those issues - where we need to keep our eye on multiple goals. Reducing emissions is an energy issue. But it is also in equal measure a human rights challenge, one that must include unprecedented investments in a full spectrum of reproductive health services for women and couples. Worldwide, 200 million women have an unmet need for family planning. And demand for contraception is projected to increase by 40% in just 15 years.

If we fail to act on this broader agenda, initiatives for reducing greenhouse gases will be swept away by a tidal wave of population growth. The White House has already made great strides in reversing the pernicious policies of the Bush Administration which turned a blind eye to the needs of billions. But additional bold action is needed.

No doubt President Obama is keenly aware of the multiple dimensions of the climate challenge. Yes, it's about energy. But, more than that, it is about meeting the basic human needs of soon-to-be seven billion people. Universal access to family planning must be a centerpiece of the climate change agenda in Copenhagen and beyond.

Stupak Amendment Blame Game

2009-12-01T16:21:00.001-05:00

There has been a lot of discussion lately in the blogosphere and op-ed columns about what how and why the Stupak amendment passed the House. One of the themes getting a lot of play here in DC is that we were put on the path to Stupak when “the Democrats” decided after the 2004 elections to aggressively recruit and support anti-choice candidates for Congress.

The facts simply don’t support this. Of the 64 Democrats who supported the Stupak amendment, only 14 were first elected in 2006 and 2008. Of the remaining 50, many have been in office for decades. In fact, the Democratic House classes elected in both 2006 and 2008 are more pro-choice than the House Democratic Caucus as a whole.

The fact is that there have always been anti-choice Democrats in Congress. In the past, though, that was largely balanced by pro-choice Republicans. Today, the balance is gone. The number of pro-choice Republicans can be, at best, counted on one hand. That makes the anti-choice Democrats far more noticeable and, arguably, important. The pro-choice Republicans have largely been replaced by pro-choice Democrats (in New England, for example). Some, of course, have been replaced by anti-choice Republicans (i.e. Dave Reichert for Jennifer Dunn in Washington and Erik Paulsen succeeding Jim Ramstad in Minnesota).

That said, I can’t remember a time when the House – or the Senate – had a true pro-choice majority. It’s undeniable, though, that it’s better now than it has been in the past – but it’s still clearly short of where we need to be.

It’s easy to get frustrated and lash out at allies when something like this happens, but it’s counterproductive. To paraphrase Barney Frank, one of the smartest members of Congress, if what you’re doing makes yourself feel better, it’s probably completely ineffective. We need to focus on making sure the Senate votes down the Stupak amendment, not looking for people to blame for the House passing it.

UN Report Focused on Women, Population, Climate

2009-11-19T21:25:00.002-05:00

By Rebecca Harrington, National Field Coordinator

Yesterday, at the National Press Club, UNFPA launched its annual state of world population report entitled “Facing a changing world: women, population, and climate”. The report launch featured an engaging panel that included Rep. Carolyn Maloney, former Sen. Tim Wirth, the current President of the UN Foundation, and representatives from UNFPA, Worldwatch Institute, and PAI.

The meeting room was packed with those in the family planning and environmental communities eager to hear about the often-neglected relationships between population, climate change, and women. The release of the report is timely, as it precedes this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference, taking place next month in Copenhagen.

Ironically, while women are least responsible for causing changes in climate, as they are likely to be more “sustainable consumers”, they are affected most by such climate change, according to the panelists. For example, drought uniquely affects women, who are generally responsible for the acquisition of water. As water becomes scarcer, women are forced to travel longer distances to get water. When this occurs, girls are likely to drop out of school to help their mothers with water collection.

Notably, and perhaps less obviously, women are also more likely to suffer more in the aftermath of natural disasters. The exceptional impact of natural disasters on women is eloquently discussed in the profile of Mandisa, a young community organizer who worked in New Orleans both prior to and following Hurricane Katrina.

The thoughtful audience members asked interesting questions about youth engagement in food production, the likelihood of these issues being discussed in Copenhagen, and the effect of emerging renewable energy technology on women in developing countries.

Despite these seemingly transparent connections, it is unlikely that the subject of gender will feature prominently in Copenhagen, according to the panelists. Encouragingly, there will be a side event at the Conference where IPPF, its Danish affiliate, Worldwatch, and PAI will discuss the importance of the empowerment of women in mitigating climate change.

Debunking Stupak

2009-11-18T12:32:00.002-05:00

By Brian Dixon

New Report Shows House Abortion Restriction Could End Nearly All Insurance Coverage of the Procedure

A new study out of the School of Public Health and Health Services at The George Washington University makes clear that pro-choice advocates are right when they claim that the Stupak Amendment is likely to significantly reduce, if not end, insurance coverage of abortion.

Late last week the main authors of the amendment to the Health Reform bill in the House, Reps. Bart Stupak (D-MI) and Joe Pitts (R-PA), published a letter to the Washington Post in which they said “We are not looking to restrict access to abortion…” The new study points out how utterly disingenuous such a claim is. Of course, it was always obvious that this claim was laughable given the long record of efforts to restrict access to abortion that each has.

The study also claims that the option for women to purchase a “policy rider” to cover abortion is largely meaningless as the amendment likely outlaws such riders in the first place. “In our view, the terms and impact of the Amendment will work to defeat the development of a supplemental coverage market for medically indicated abortions.” Supplemental coverage, or riders, the authors say, must work in conjunction with the basic coverage, but the amendment prohibits that conjunction. So, again we have the authors being either purposely misleading or woefully uninformed about the scope of their own legislation.

The GWU study can prove to be very helpful as we work in the coming weeks to ensure that the U.S. Senate rejects this approach and to convince members of the House who supported the amendment originally that they were misled regarding the scope of the restriction.

The Economist is Stingy with Praise for Family Planning Accomplishments

2009-11-03T11:19:00.029-05:00

By Marian Starkey, Director of Communications

The print edition of The Economist this week focuses on fertility and population. The lead story, "Falling Fertility" makes important connections between rapid population growth and poverty and the inverse relationship between population stabilization and economic growth. I was reading through the story, pleased with the facts covered, until I came to this paragraph:

In principle, there are three ways of limiting human environmental impacts: through population policy, technology and governance. The first of those does not offer much scope. Population growth is already slowing almost as fast as it naturally could. Easier access to family planning, especially in Africa, could probably lower its expected peak from around 9 billion to perhaps 8.5 billion. Only Chinese-style coercion would bring it down much below that; and forcing poor people to have fewer children than they want because the rich consume too many of the world’s resources would be immoral.

The well-meaning authors of this article are simply wrong here. If women around the world with an unmet need for family planning had affordable access to modern contraception, population growth could be slowing a heck of a lot faster. The authors also failed to disclose that the projection of 9 billion people in 2050 is dependent upon drastic fertility declines in the countries where population is growing fastest. So we're really talking about the difference between 9 and 11 billion (the projection if fertility rates stay the same as they are now), not 8.5 and 9 billion. And to suggest that any sane person supports a population policy that would force poor women to have fewer children so the rich of the world can consume more is just absurd.

The briefing, "Go Forth and Multiply a Lot Less" describes the global move toward replacement-level fertility (the level required for each generation to replace the last). This article at least mentions unwanted pregnancies and unmet need for family planning as factors in high fertility, but the reader is quickly diverted to discussion of girls' education--which is a proxy factor for lower fertility--and then reminded of the terrible coercion of China's one-child policy.

Another briefing, "The rich are different" quickly outlines the phenomenon of rising fertility in the developed countries that have higher gender equality than in the countries where fertility remains unprecedentedly low.

I hate to criticize whenever someone, especially a respected news source, pays attention to population issues, but I just had to point out a couple of the major flaws in the authors' arguments.

Here is the letter I sent in response to the lead article. Letters are published on Thursdays, so we'll see then if mine makes the cut. *Update: There were no letters printed about the fertility articles today. Maybe next week...

In “Go forth and multiply a lot less,” the UN medium population projection of 9.2 billion in 2050 is accepted as destiny. As The Economist surely knows, projections are dependent on assumptions. The scenario that would deliver a population of 9.2 billion is ambitious fertility decline starting now. In fact, projections range from 8-11 billion people, depending on how quickly fertility falls. If it drops drastically and soon, growth could stop at 8 billion; if fertility decline stagnates, population will still be growing at 11 billion in 2050.

Kenya’s fertility rate was declining impressively until a couple of years ago, when the country experienced a significant reduction in family planning aid. As a result, population projections for 2050 were doubled. Timing is everything because of the inherent momentum that keeps population growing even after “replacement level fertility” is achieved. The larger the base of women yet to reach their reproductive years, the larger the population will grow once they start having children.

The rapid fertility decline in Matlab, Bangladesh was precipitated by the availability of contraceptives, not higher incomes or better health—those followed as a result. Fertility drops when incomes rise because people can finally afford contraceptives. When contraception is available at no cost, all economic quintiles have similarly low fertility, as in Thailand and Vietnam. Educated women are, indeed, more likely to want fewer children. But they’re also more likely to be in economic positions that allow them to purchase contraceptives.

The article got most things right, but it simplified the role of family planning in fertility decline. Women want smaller families and tend to use contraception if they are educated about the methods and most importantly, if they have access. Sub-Saharan Africa continues to have high fertility because many women have no access. Donor countries have fallen shamefully short of the amounts they pledged for family planning assistance at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. Every year that we under-fund family planning is another step closer to a world of 11 billion.

U.S. finally on board with progress

2009-10-21T14:08:00.005-04:00

By Brian Dixon

Last week, the United Nations held a special session to commemorate the 15^th Anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) and to review progress toward meeting the ambitious goal of ensuring universal access to family planning by 2015.

At this meeting, a U.S. official delivered an important statement reiterating that President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton are committed to expanding global access to family planning. He said, “The United States strongly supports the goals and ideals of the ICPD, and under President Obama’s leadership has renewed our commitment to work with the international community to implement the ICPD Program of Action.”

Such an expression comes after eight years of Bush administration actions designed to undermine progress on family planning. Speeches are nice and can be helpful, but actions are more important. To that end, we’ve been extremely pleased by the significant increases in international family planning that the president has called for and that congress is moving toward approving. We’re also very happy with the president’s decision to restore U.S. aid to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and to lift the harmful Global Gag Rule that barred U.S. assistance to some of the most experienced and effective providers of family planning in the developing world.

"Not Yet Rain" had advocates pouring in

2009-10-19T12:48:00.009-04:00

By Rebecca Harrington, National Field Coordinator

On Thursday, October 15, we held a film screening in Columbus, OH, the first in a series of events for our Double the Money campaign. We showed the film Not Yet Rain at the well-loved Studio 35 Cinema and Drafthouse. A one-screen theater with a vintage feel, funky wall murals, and a cozy bar, the theater is a staple of Clintonville, a hip northern Columbus neighborhood.

For the screening, we partnered with the Columbus International Film and Video Festival and the local chapter of the Sierra Club. The Film Festival prides itself on 57 years of showing and granting awards to unique and edgy films. The Sierra Club chapter works on environmental issues specific to central Ohio.

A diverse and interesting crowd braved the Ohio cold to watch the film, chat with Population Connection staff and other guests, and to eat delicious food from the local Surly Girl Saloon, another Columbus favorite. In addition to discussing the film as a group and connecting with people at a reception following the screening, many of those in attendance signed our petition to Double the Money, and requested copies of the film to share with classes, groups, and friends.

A few especially memorable guests included a physician’s assistant student from Cleveland, who was grateful for (and startled by) all she’d learned from the film and discussion; an anthropology professor from Tennessee, who wants to screen the film with her classes; and a mother and daughter pair who are passionate about both the arts and women’s issues.

In addition to representing a diversity of interests, people of all ages attended the screening. Everyone was equally energetic and engaged, and the group melded nicely. Free dinner, beer, and cupcakes always brings a group together!

The screening was a great way to kick things off in Ohio, and we’re very much looking forward to our next event in Columbus.

Lots of Surprising Results

2009-10-09T14:44:00.015-04:00

By Marian Starkey

The XXVI International Population Conference (IUSSP) ended last Friday in Marrakech and I am finally settling back into my normal office routine. I didn't have the greatest Internet connection while I was overseas so I neglected to post a final blog entry about the conference sessions. Here it is, a week late.

Climate change was a bigger topic of discussion at this conference than at other demography conferences I've attended in recent years. Brian O'Neil, who does population/climate research at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria was supposed to present his research but was not able to make it to Marrakech at the last minute. His colleague, Leiwen Jiang, presented in his place. Basically what they've found is that aging has a negative effect on carbon emissions while urbanization and smaller households have a positive effect (in this instance, negative means "good" i.e. fewer emissions, and positive means "bad" i.e. more emisisons). They stress that although the number of people on earth does have an effect on emissions, more potent factors are the age structure and lifestyle choices of those people.

The Guttmacher Institute led a training session early on Thursday morning for demographers who wanted to learn to translate their research results into policy recommendations. Session panelists encouraged researchers to communicate their results by starting with the study conclusions and not getting bogged down in methodology, which lawmakers and program managers trust them to execute responsibly. I have to admit that sometimes at these conferences I wish demographers would spend more time presenting their results than their methods for the same reason. Their papers are usually available for download for those who wish to delve deeper into the study methods they used.

A few sessions focused on the demographic consequences of HIV/AIDS. Lori Hunter, who edits the journal Population and Environment, found that families in South Africa who have experienced the death of a family member due to AIDS were negatively affected in terms of food security. One person she talked to actually said, "Locusts are our new beef." Losing an adult in a family of dependents has severe destabilizing effects, both socially and economically.

Another researcher found that female infidelity in Africa might be more widespread than previously believed, based on the high number of couples in which only the woman was infected with HIV. The somewhat counterintuitive results also suggest that girls who attend school are at higher risk of contracting HIV because they are away from their families and experience more independence than girls who stay home.

Joseph Potter from the University of Texas-Austin presented a very interesting study of women in El Paso, TX who use the contraceptive pill. Those who traveled across the border to Mexico to buy pills over the counter for about $5 per pack had much lower discontinuation rates than women who got one pack at a time at the El Paso clinic for free. Only when women were given six packs or more at the clinic did their discontinuation rates drop to the level of the women who bought them at Mexican pharmacies. These results imply that increasing ease of accessibility (no clinic appointment) and providing multiple months of protection at a time increase the continuation rates of pill users.

A researcher from the American University in Cairo studied the fertility differences between Morocco and Egypt. She asked the question "Why is fertility decline faster in Morocco when Egypt has a higher Human Development Index?" She found that although desired fertility is higher in Morocco, later marriage and longer birth intervals make actual fertility lower. The fertility rate of educated women in Morocco is lower than equally educated women in Egypt.

As usual, the most valuable parts of being at this huge conference were the side conversations I had with people at lunch and during coffee breaks. I made a lot of new professional alliances and reinforced existing ones for Population Connection. I know that our info table also helped spread the word about our unique and important work. By the end of the week, only a few copies of The Reporter remained in my booth--everything else had been taken.

The next IUSSP conference will be in four years, location as yet undecided. I am already looking forward to it and will make sure to stock my table more heavily with the fun supplies that conference-goers like to take home: pens, tote bags, stickers, etc. For a serious bunch of researchers, they sure do like their freebies.

Eager to show off

2009-09-29T17:48:00.008-04:00

By Marian Starkey

Marrakech presents itself as laid back and fast-paced all at once. Men lounge at cafes drinking sugary mint tea while motor scooters whiz by, nearly crashing into pedestrians and each other at every turn. Horns honk and donkeys bray, trying to be heard over the calls to prayer which blare throughout the city over loudspeakers five times a day. Still, everyone has a smile and is eager to help the tourists from France? England? No, USA! Ah, USA! New York? No, Washington, DC. Ah, Washington, welcome my friends!

I spent the last two days playing hooky to conference sessions and instead visiting various agencies and organizations around Marrakech and the surrounding towns. Yesterday, my bus got a police escort and a royal welcome at the reproductive health clinic about an hour southeast of the city. Town residents lined up along the streets for miles, waving us in. Doctors and staff at the clinic were eager to show us their beautiful facility at the foot of the Atlas mountains. Women who had just given birth proudly showed us their newborn babies. We were all impressed to hear that all services at the clinic, from family planning to safe delivery, are free. Perhaps clinics like this are the reason why Morocco has been so successful at reducing its fertility rate from over 7 to 2.4 in just four decades. The urban fertility rate in Morocco is just an even 2, lower than the U.S. rate.

Today I visited an intake center at the hospital for women and children victims of violence. Doctors were sensitive to the victims' privacy and did not allow us to tour the center, but were happy to answer many of our most pressing questions in the courtyard outside.

This afternoon, I went to a local orphanage for kids 5-18 years old. Many of the 80 residents were plucked from the streets where they had been abandoned by their parents and were begging for a living. They now attend school full time and share a loving home with dedicated staff.

I always expect program directors to exaggerate the success of the work they're accomplishing, but all three of these operations truly did seem to be improving the lives of the most vulnerable women and children who live in and around Marrakech.

Tomorrow it's back to the grind with back-to-back research sessions all day. Publications are flying off my info table too, which is a very good thing, not least because it means I won't have to lug them back to good old Washington, DC.

International Population Conference Day 1

2009-09-27T18:33:00.008-04:00

By Marian Starkey

Greetings from Marrakech! I am here for the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) conference, which happens in a different location every four years. This is the first time that the conference has been held in an African and/or Arab nation, and King Mohammed VI has been a very gracious host so far. He even invited the participants to a special dinner on Tuesday evening. Of course, there are 2,300 of us, so I'm guessing it won't be an intimate affair with lots of photo ops one-on-one.

The conference started today with side meetings, rather than typical research presentations. My first session was a follow-up to the research conference I attended in Ghana last September. It was fun seeing friends that I made a year ago and hearing about the success many of them have had in getting their papers published. There was also a request for more research in the future that could be translated into policy, which I was happy to hear.

The next session I attended featured our expert Board member, Duff Gillespie, as a panelist. The topic was training a new generation of reproductive health specialists and how to do that most effectively. Duff told the story of his own career (I learned that he actually trained in criminology before becoming a USAID career professional!). He criticized donors for neglecting population studies and identified this as the core reason why the field of demography is not sustainable. He called for a renewed interest in population studies by private donors and governments in order to keep the field alive.

The day ended with the official opening ceremony. We heard from IUSSP president, John Cleland; UNFPA director Thoraya Obaid; and several other panelists (who spoke in Arabic so I could not understand their addresses, unfortunately). Berber percussionists rounded out the evening with their energizing chanting, dancing, and drumming.

I got my information table set up this morning and by the end of the day all of the tote bags and pens that I brought were gone! Hopefully now that the "fun" freebies are gone, people will feel compelled to pick up a copy of The Reporter or some of our educational materials.

More tomorrow, after I visit a local reproductive health clinic...

Is family planning a carbon mitigation panacea?

2009-09-16T09:49:00.027-04:00

By Marian Starkey

Several newspaper articles have covered the release of a report about family planning and climate change from Optimum Population Trust (OPT), an organization in the UK. I have been posting those articles on our website's "News" page. The attention has reached a critical mass and now it's time to comment.

The study claims to prove that meeting all unmet need for family planning is a more cost effective way of reducing carbon emissions than are other "green" technologies. To do this, the researchers calculated how many tons of carbon will be emitted between now and 2050 without meeting unmet need. They also determined how many tons of carbon would be emitted if unmet need were met (i.e. if there were fewer people emitting carbon). Then they subtract the latter from the former to calculate the difference in tons of carbon emitted between the two scenarios. Finally, they divided the total cost of providing family planning to the women with unmet need for the next 40 years by the number of tons of carbon that would be avoided by meeting unmet need. This is the cost per ton of carbon mitigated, which they estimate is $6.46.

The press releases have all stated that OPT commissioned the London School of Economics (LSE) to do the research, which leads one to believe that world-class faculty researchers are behind the paper. This is not the case. The research paper was actually written by a student at the LSE with the help of a non-faculty supervisor.

While population stabilization is obviously crucial to solving the climate crisis, there are a few methodology issues in this study that must be addressed. Here are the biggest ones, in descending order of importance:

The figure used for current unmet need--201 million women--refers only to women in the developing world. The authors calculate the proportion of people in the world with unmet need by dividing 201 million by the current world population--6.8 billion (the result is 3%). They assume that this proportion of "unmet need" equals "demand for family planning," which they hold constant for each year between now and 2050 for their cost-benefit analysis. Of course, demand for family planning is not actually the same as unmet need, and is much greater than 201 million women worldwide.
Then they take a figure from Guttmacher Institute, again for developing countries only, that unintended births could be reduced by 72% if all unmet need in the developing world were met. They apply this figure to every country in the world, including developed countries. Meaning, for example, that they assume that women in the United States who have unintended births would have 72% less if only they had access to contraception. The problem with this methodology is that in most developed countries, most women do have access to family planning if they want it. So spending an additional $22 per woman (the estimated cost of providing contraception to a woman in the developing world each year) on contraceptive supplies will probably not actually reduce the percentage of unintended births by very much. In the United States especially, more money must be spent on teen pregnancy prevention and reproductive health education. Indeed, the most prevalent answers women give in the U.S. for becoming pregnant accidentally are that they didn't expect to have sex and they didn't think they could become pregnant. Spending more money on birth control pills would not help these women. Education and better preparation would.
It is not clear which population projection was used for the scenario in which unmet need is not met. The authors simply state that the projection came from the UN. The UN produces several projections based on different fertility and mortality assumptions and it would be helpful to know which one was used for this study. * Correction: the author directed me to a footnote that I overlooked, which stated that the medium UN population projection was used.

Having said all this, the discussion of the role of family planning in climate change mitigation is long overdue. Indeed, any serious effort to combat global climate change simply must include a commitment to universal access to family planning and contraceptives.

Is it even possible to have a more equitable distribution of emissions with a decent standard of living in a world of 12 billion people or more? It will already be hard enough in a world of 8 or 9 billion. Right now, in our world of 6.8 billion people, too many are not using enough carbon to sustain healthy, productive lifestyles. Yet, we are still raising the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere to dangerous levels.

The per capita emissions in wealthy countries have to be dramatically reduced. But, at the same time, in some developing countries, per capita emissions will have to increase if people are to meet their most basic needs. Reaching that balance that allows everyone a healthy quality of life while protecting the environment will be a challenge made even more difficult by a growing population.

Meeting the existing unmet need for family planning is an important and cost-effective way to help meet the climate crisis. But, it alone will not solve the problem. In fact, the author found that only 9.3 gigatons of carbon emissions would be averted over the next 40 years, which is just a little more than what we currently emit globally in one year. But it must be part of any thorough discussion on mitigation strategies and any rational discussion on climate justice.

Texas Again Leads the Way?

2009-09-08T15:04:00.002-04:00

By Brian Dixon

Texas once again shows the folly of allowing right wing ideology to substitute for good health policy. It has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the country and the highest rate of repeat births to teenagers. It is also a state where it is very difficult for teenagers to get birth control.

According to a report in the Dallas Morning News, many doctors in the Dallas region refuse to prescribe contraceptives to teenagers without parental consent. Experts believe that Dallas policy requiring parental consent for birth control at ten school based health centers also applies to them – even though it doesn’t.

Not even young parents can get birth control confidentially – leading to the fact that Dallas leads the nation in repeat teenage pregnancy. Here is real evidence that parental consent rules are utterly counterproductive.

Sadly, a number of conservative organizations and lawmakers are pushing for federal legislation imposing this failed approach on the entire nation. When, and if, health reform comes to the full House and Senate, you can expect many amendments to limit access to reproductive health services for young people – and indeed for all Americans.

Those lawmakers need to hear from you that ideology can’t substitute for evidence when it comes to health policy and that young people need access to confidential family planning services.

Demographic Bomb is a Dud

2009-08-11T14:29:00.051-04:00

By Marian Starkey, Communications Manager

This week, Amsterdam is playing host to the ultra-conservative World Congress of Families. An international gathering of family traditionalists, the WCF offers seminars that range from homeschooling to faith to MTV. Sessions like "The Social and Economic Effects of Declining Birth Rates" and "The Philosophical Roots of Demographic Winter" are also part of the program. There's even a seminar called "Threats to the Family from Addiction to Pornography."

Tonight, participants will attend the first international screening of Demographic Bomb: Worldwide Decline of Human Fertility Rates. The incendiary film is the sequel to Demographic Winter, a documentary released in 2008 that was alarmist enough as a stand-alone, in my opinion.

Here's the trailer for Demographic Bomb:

Here's the trailer for Demographic Winter:

Some of the footage overlaps with the trailer above, but there are a few unique opinions that make watching it worthwhile. I especially like the part where a 1970s "preoccupation" with the population bomb is blamed for informing women's rights, gay rights, and environmentalist movements. Yes, what a tragedy that women, homosexuals, and the other species that share our planet finally got a voice.

Demographic Bomb is supposed to scare viewers into believing that an impending economic collapse will be the result of our refusal to continue a century of rapid population growth. One talking head points out that never has a country with a shrinking population experienced economic growth. That can be explained by the fact that until this decade, the only time regional populations shrank was during an epidemic. The Black Plague in Europe had people a bit too preoccupied with burying relatives and trying to stay alive to be able to think about increasing their capital. Population decline due to increased affluence and lifestyle choices is brand new and we cannot predict how it will affect national economies in the near or long-term future.

The end of the trailer is the part that disturbed me the most, when a man mused that really, only "certain kinds of people are on their way to extinction." The ensuing spooky white text on black background laments that it's not politically correct to say so, despite the fact that academics are well-informed about this "problem." I guess the guy at the beginning who described a France with no "original" French people went out on an un-PC limb in making his comments. After all, a future France filled with North Africans is something that makes xenophobes shake in their boots.

Basically, what the World Congress of Families wants you to know is that it supports you and your family. That is, if you are heterosexual, have at least two children, are [preferably] white, Christian, and do not look at pornography.

Tiny People, Big Footprints

2009-08-05T16:16:00.003-04:00

By Brian Dixon

A new study by statisticians at Oregon State University points out that reducing family size may be as much as 20 times more important than anything else people might do to reduce their carbon footprint.

This is just the latest evidence of the clear connection between population growth and climate change. We can only hope that sometime soon policymakers will make the same connection as the scientists.

It’s an especially critical connection to make as the world stumbles toward a global plan to bring emissions to a level that allows for climate stability. Really, is it even possible to achieve that if the global population grows to 12 billion by 2050? That’s not outside the realm of the possible.

It seems obvious that if we’re ever to get to a fair, just and humane level of global per capita emissions – one which isn’t dependent on keeping billions and billions of people in abject poverty and despair – stabilizing population is necessary.