Giving Compass' Take:

· The authors explain how family planning not only improves reproductive health and protects women’s rights, but it also acts as a catalyst for economic prosperity.

· How does family planning and reproductive health affect the economy? How can we make family planning a reality for all? How can donors support these efforts? 

· Here's more on accelerating momentum on family planning.

For more than two decades, the global development community has anchored support for contraception in its role of advancing the reproductive health and rights of women worldwide. Since the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development, family planning has been framed as a means to enable women to freely determine whether, when and how many children they will have.

Many shied away from touting the economic benefits of family planning to avoid conflating it with the idea of population control and coercion. The health benefits of contraception—preventing unintended pregnancies, averting unsafe abortions and reducing maternal and child deaths—were strongly emphasized while economic benefits were seemingly relegated to the background.

A welcome development in recent years is the accumulation of evidence on the extensive and far-reaching dividends that investments in family planning yield beyond improving women’s health. We now know more definitively that family planning also leads to more educated communities, a healthier population and planet and wealthier nations.

Read the full article about family planning, women's rights, and economic prosperity by Dr. Jose G. Rimon II and Dr. J.M. Ian Salas at PSI.