Family Planning

Consumer behaviour and contraceptive decisions: resolving a decades-long puzzle

Martha Campbell
2006

Introduction: Demographers’ theoretical explanations for fertility decline have been based for decades on an assumption that couples make family size decisions influenced by a changing balance between costs and benefits of childbearing, resulting in parents’ reduced demand for children. It has been widely assumed that these decisions are based on changes in social or economic factors, such as increased education, wealth or economic opportunities, or urbanisation, or other related factors in their lives. However, a number of situations in developing countries have been documented showing...

Tackling the unacceptable: Nigeria approves misoprostol for postpartum haemorrhage

Amy Jadesimi
Friday E Okonofua
2006

This article discusses the approval of misoprostol in Nigeria for the prevention of postpartum hemorrhage in 2006.

Nigeria has 2% of the world’s population, but 10% of the global burden of maternal deaths – a statistic that is described by Nigeria’s president Olusegun Obasanjo as “unacceptable and must be reversed”. In January 2006, Nigeria took an important step towards reversing this tragic situation when the Nigerian National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control approved the distribution of misoprostol for the prevention or treatment of postpartum haemorrhage (PPH...

Barriers to Fertility Regulation: A Review of the Literature

Martha Campbell
Nuriye Nalan Sahin-Hodoglugil
Malcolm Potts
2006

The evidence in the demographic and family planning literature of the range and diversity of the barriers to fertility regulation in many developing countries is reviewed in this article from a consumer perspective. Barriers are defined as the constraining factors standing between women and the realistic availability of the technologies and correct information they need in order to decide whether and when to have a child. The barriers include limited method choice, financial costs, the status of women, medical and legal restrictions, provider bias, and misinformation.

The presence...

The Pill and the blackboard

Malcolm Potts
2006

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....

China’s one child policy

Malcolm Potts
2006

China’s one child policy: The policy that changed the world

“The Chinese one child policy is unique in the history of the world. It was a source of great pain for one generation, but a generation later it began to yield important economic benefits. For China, and the world as a whole, the one child policy was one of the most important social policies ever implemented.”

Published in British Medical Journal, August 2006, 361-362

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Population and environment in the twenty-first century

Malcolm Potts
2007

Abstract: In the past 50 years global population grew by 3.7 billion. There is a large unmet need for family planning and wherever women have been given the means and the information to decide if or when to have the next child, then family size has fallen, often rapidly. However, since the UN 1994 Cairo conference on population and development, support for international family has collapsed and fertility declines in many of the poorest countries have stalled. Amongst some of the most vulnerable groups family size has risen. The investment made in voluntary family planning will largely...

Eight Mondays: a parliamentary group ends the silence on population

Martha Campbell
2007

In the summer of 2006, the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Population, Development and Reproductive Health held a series of Monday hearings at Westminster, London, UK, on population growth and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). For a joyous moment, good science and sound politics came together.

Published in The Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care, April 2007, 33(2):75-6

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Return of the Population Growth Factor

Martha Campbell
John Cleland
Alex Ezeh
Ndola Prata
2007

This Policy Forum explains how the Millenium Development Goals set by the United Nations cannot be achieved unless family planning is made easily available in the lowest-income countries.

Published in Science, March 16 2007, 1501-2

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Conservation and family planning in Tanzania: the TACARE experience

Amy A. Grossman
Mary Mavanza
2007

Abstract: Community-based distribution (CBD) programs present an alternative way of effectively reaching people in rural areas of developing countries where conventional methods of delivery do not exist or fail. This paper reviews the experience and findings from the Jane Goodall Institute’s (JGI) TACARE program in the Kigoma region of Tanzania. It focuses on the family planning CBD program and its integration within the TACARE program to meet the broader mission of JGI’s conservation efforts. Both qualitative and survey data suggest that the CBD program meets the needs for contraception...

Population growth and the MDGs

Malcolm Potts
2007

Letter to the Editor: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine

Published in Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 2007 Jun;100(6):256-7, Letters

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