Family Planning

The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development set broad new goals for family planning and reproductive health. The resources available to fund these much needed programmes, however, are much smaller than was originally calculated. To divide the limited budgets for the maximum health impact, likely resource flows need to be set against the cost of various family planning and reproductive health interventions. Preliminary analysis suggests that selection of cost-effective delivery of family planning services would still meet much of the need for family planning, and that...

Using data from a nationally representative survey conducted in 1996, some two years after the end of a major outbreak of war, we examine the impact of war on the timing of recent births and war-related differences in reproductive preferences in Angola. We find evidence of a wartime drop and a postwar rebound in fertility, but these trends vary greatly, depending on the type and degree of exposure to war and on women’s socioeconomic characteristics. At the same time, variations by parity are nonsignificant. In fertility preferences, the relative antinatalism of Angola’s most modernized...

It is imperative to make family planning more accessible in low resource settings. The poorest couples have the highest fertility, the lowest contraceptive use and the highest unmet need for contraception. It is also in the low resource settings where maternal and child mortality is the highest. Family planning can contribute to improvements in maternal and child health, especially in low resource settings where overall access to health services is limited. Four critical steps should be taken to increase access to family planning in resource-poor settings: (i) increase knowledge...

This intervention study assessed school readiness (SR)-related parent behaviors and perceived barriers for Latino parent-child pairs (N = 149, Mage = 4.5) after a clinic-based SR intervention (n = 74) or standard well-child care (n = 75). Intervention was a 1-hour visit with a community health worker (CHW) to assess child SR, model SR interactions, and provide SR tools and resources. Primary outcomes were parent behaviors and barriers collected by phone questionnaire. Regression analyses revealed that parents in the intervention were more likely to tell...