By Suzanne York. What is the role of government when it comes to having babies?  Should the goal be to empower women or promote economic growth? The government of Ethiopia announced earlier this week that it will try to lower its total fertility rate to 2.6 by the year 2020 from the current rate of
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org Family planning efforts are mainly directed at women, which makes sense.  Yet too often men are disregarded, and they should be part of most discussions on family planning. Involving both men and women will not only help families, but the environment too. One overlooked topic when it comes to women, men
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org To show how far we have come as a civilized society, and how far we still have to go, the organization Engender Health recently released a video (see below) on past types of rather frightening forms of contraception in honor of World Contraception Day (September 26). While there are many ways to
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org In this increasingly polarized country with a deeply partisan Congress, a divided Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of corporate rights (aka corporate “personhood”) over a woman’s right to use the contraception of her choice. In the long-anticipated outcome of Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that family-owned
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By Suzanne York. In a time of government budget cuts and austerity programs, family planning is a low-cost investment that yields big dividends.  And more importantly, it saves lives. Globally, there are 222 million women in developing counties who lack access to contraception.  Off these, 162 million women live in the world’s poorest countries. Barriers
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org The number of American teenagers getting pregnant is at an historic low.  While this is good news, the U.S. teen birth rate is still highest in the industrialized world. Rates of teen pregnancy, birth and abortion have declined dramatically in the United States since their peak in the early 1990s.  According
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org One solution to easing the effects of global climate change is one that is not often heard – that of voluntary family planning. At a talk this week on “Condoms and Climate” given at the Commonwealth Club of California, Alan Weisman, author of Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org At the recent International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP), a big gathering of leaders and activists on family planning and reproductive health, there was a big effort to promote the role of men.  While it may seem obvious, men are sometimes missing from family planning. Certainly education and empowerment of women
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org Most Americans have heard about the glitches with the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. But apparently many women haven’t heard that birth control is essentially available for free under health insurance plans.  According to the Phoenix Marketing Company, which has been tracking this topic, this is
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org As the United States is recovering from the government shutdown and the still-ongoing battle over the Affordable Care Act, which was legally passed by Congress, it is worthwhile to note the state of healthcare as it applies to reproduction and the rights of women. The Guttmacher Institute recently came out with
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