Family Planning Saves Lives

Family planning programmes help millions of women by providing reproductive health care that saves lives, preventing unintended preganancies and offering the opportunity for over 600 million people worldwide to plan their families using contraception.

While fertility levels are falling, rapid population growth remains a critical issue in many developing countries, where needs are great but resources are scarce.

Family planning benefits individuals and countries through:

Saving women's lives
Avoiding unitended pregnancies could prevent at least a quarter of all maternal deaths in developing countries.  Using contraception helps avoid unsafe abortions to end unintended pregnanies.

Saving children's lives
Spacing preganacies at least two years apart helps women have healthier children and improves the chances of infant's survival by an estimated 50%.  Limiting births to a woman's healthiest childbearing years also improves her children's chances of survivng and remaining healthy.

Offering women more choice
By controlling their own childbearing through using effective contraception, opportunites in education, employment and community involvement can open up for many women.

Female education and the availability of good quality, safe and affordable family planning services can prevent death and illness for millions of women around the world.

Family planning enables women to:

• Space births
  This can prevent an average of one in four infant deaths. When births are spaced less than two years apart, particularly less than 18 months, infants are more likely to be premature and have a low birth weight.
  
  
• Postpone early, high-risk pregnancies
  Girls aged 10 to 14 years are five times more likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth than women aged 20 to 24 years. In some countries girls are married as teenagers.
  
  
• Prevent unplanned pregnancies
  More than one third of all pregnancies are unplanned. 120-150 million women worldwide who want to limit or space their pregnancies have no means to do so.
  
  Unplanned pregnancies can have a huge impact on the health of the mother. They may result in children being born too closely together or too early in life. They may also lead to the death of the mother if she resorts to unsafe abortion. 78,000 women die annually as a result of unsafe abortion.
  
  An unplanned pregnancy may also be unwanted if the woman has been sexually coerced or raped.
  

• Protect against sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) such as HIV/AIDS.
  In 1997 almost 6,000 women a day became infected with HIV. Many of these women will pass HIV on to their infants during pregnancy, delivery or breast-feeding.
  
  Every day more than one million people are infected with a curable STD. Many of these people, especially women, don't have any symptoms, so do not know that they need treatment.
  
  Chlamydia is the most commonly diagnosed STD in the world and can lead to infertility. 70% of chlamydia cases are in people under the age of 25 years.