The Bixby Center is researching the safety of community based distributions and administration of Depo Provera.
Our research in family planning is designed to bring family planning back into international discussion and to promote improvements in access and availability of contraceptives for women who desire to limit family size.
Surveys show that 200 million women wish to delay or stop the next pregnancy and over 100 million are not using any contraception because they lack access to it or face other barriers to its use.
We believe that no woman can be free unless she can choose when and how many children to have, that when women are offered realistic ways to limit their childbearing, family size always falls, and that access to family planning saves infant and maternal lives. We have a long history of task shifting and removing non evidence-based barriers to family planning. We are vividly aware of the public health burden of unsafe abortion and the suffering of women who experience it.
Our focus areas include:
- Increasing access to family planning by highlighting and confronting barriers to the use of contraception and safe abortion
- Improving access to needed commodities by facilitating the distribution of low cost contraceptives
- Documenting the synergy that family planning offers for both individual and community welfare
- Exploring ways to make available easy to use technologies for fertility regulation that can be sustained on a large scale
- Researching cost-effectiveness of family planning in maternal health programs
- Studying unmet need for family planning and its contribution to fertility
- Demonstrating the need for task shifting in family planning
- Producing evidence for policy makers of the importance of family planning to reduce maternal and child mortality
Projects: