Population & Reproductive Health

Cause Overview

Population refers to the ability of societies to balance human and environmental priorities with human and economic growth. Reproductive health encompasses family planning and other services women, men, and adolescents need to keep themselves healthy, including information about avoiding both unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Nonprofits around the world address Population and Reproductive Health issues using a broad range of strategies and approaches: 201 million women in developing countries would like to stop childbearing or space their next birth, but are not using a modern contraceptive method. Family planning information and services, help women to have the number of children they want and can support. Spacing births helps women have healthier pregnancies and improves the survival of their newborns and their other children.

Each year, over half a million women die from complications of pregnancy. Properly trained and equipped health care providers, such as nurse-midwives, can prevent and treat most of these complications.

39.4 million people are living with HIV/AIDS. Educating men, women, and young people about the risks of sexually transmitted diseases, providing condoms, preventing the transmission of HIV from mothers to their children, and providing young women with educational and economic opportunities that allow them to resist relationships with "sugar daddies" are among the range of approaches that are being used to fight this epidemic.

In the words of Kofi Annan, "the eradication of poverty and hunger...cannot be achieved if questions of population and reproductive health are not squarely addressed."

Source: Family Care International