We know from our own observations and from countless studies that education is an immensely powerful driver of social change and improvement. At the level of basic health, an educated woman looks after her own health and that of her children more successfully than an uneducated woman. Education – especially the education of women – opens the door to greater wealth and hopefully greater fulfilment. The fact that the mother’s access to contraception can improve the educational opportunities of her children, as well as her health and that of her infants, is an insight we should always value. At a conference in India in 1993, faced with compelling evidence from 30 years of international assistance to family planning, India’s former commissioner of family planning reversed his 1974 aphorism, by proclaiming: “Contraception is the best development.”
Published in Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care, 2006, 32(3): 147–148
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