In 2012, at the London Summit on Family Planning, government and private-sector donors got together to launch what had been described as a “groundbreaking effort” to reach an additional 120 million women and girls in the world’s poorest countries by 2020.
The effort, since consolidated into a movement called “FP2020,” seeks to make “affordable, lifesaving contraceptives, information, services, and supplies” available to the world’s women, ensuring that “women in developing countries can have the same freedom to access family planning services—without coercion, discrimination and violence—as women in the developed world.”
Beth Schlachter, executive director of FP2020, described it as “a platform for collaboration.” One of its aims was ensuring that “the rights-based framework [of family planning] is available to women and girls who choose [to avail themselves of it].”
Another way of viewing FP2020 is that between 2012 and 2020, “over 200,000 fewer women and girls will die in pregnancy and childbirth, and nearly 3 million fewer infants will die in their first year of life.”
Rarely is family planning seen as a lifesaving intervention, especially in a country like ours where the “debate” tends to center on matters like dogma, fears of encouraging promiscuity, women’s autonomy (and the loss of male dominance), and the supposed desirability of large families. This, even if public opinion polls dating back decades show that Filipino men and women want to have smaller families, believe in the value of family planning, and more important, would support candidates advocating family planning.
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At this year’s International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP), at the halfway mark toward 2020, despite promises of new money and heightened involvement, the folks behind FP2020 are seeing the drive flagging, with the numbers of acceptors falling short of targets.
Several factors have been cited to explain this, including the “hostility” of the George W. Bush administration to family planning, which resulted in the stunting of US government policy, programs and funding.
Another factor has been the emergence of new health and humanitarian emergencies, such as the Ebola outbreak in some countries in Africa and now the alarming spread of the Zika virus, and the redirection of humanitarian funds in Europe toward addressing the immigration crisis.
And yet, said Ellen Starbird of the US Agency for International Development in a talk before our group of women journalists, family planning is “critical” to the attainment of the Social Development Goals or SDGs, a set of specific goals agreed on by the world governments to be reached by 2030.
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Family planning, said Starbird, is included in two goals—No. 3 and No. 5—that concern health. And yet, she asserted, in all 17 SDGs are “17 good reasons to support family planning.” After all, a quick way of summing up the SDGs is that they are all about “people, planet, prosperity and peace,” all of which can be attained only if we stabilize world population growth, ensure a sustainable environment far into the future, raise standards of living, and support stable governments.
At the opening plenary of ICFP, Christopher Elias, speaking in behalf of the cosponsor, the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health of the Bloomberg School of Public Health of Johns Hopkins University, warned that the organizers of FP2020 are “falling behind” in the march toward reaching the movement’s goals. “We owe it to the future to catch up,” he declared.
Elias suggested three ways by which everyone in the community could “catch up”:
First, persist in the advocacy for family planning and reproductive health and rights, putting points across “consistently and compellingly,” with emphasis on the lifesaving and lifetime benefits to be gained from access to family planning.
Second, improve the quality of services and ensure “comprehensive access to all forms of family planning, especially to long-lasting reversible methods.” He urged service providers to expand the contraceptive choices of users, urging the private sector to increase its involvement.
And third, “expand access to those most disenfranchised.” These include the urban poor and the youth, who are deprived of information, counseling and services (and in the Philippines, by way of a Supreme Court intervention).
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“We need to challenge each other,” said Elias, “to ask ourselves: What concrete steps can we take to get back on track?”
The ultimate goal, he declared, is for the global family planning community “not just to survive but also to thrive.”
In a more intimate roundtable with selected journalists from Asia, Elias emphasized that improving the quality of services could be a “game changer,” with clinics and centers offering “a more diverse range of methods” being a key element in achieving quality services.
“Countries own these programs,” Elias emphasized, to questions raised about foreign interference in government policies, given the Gates Foundation’s prominence in the drive to revitalize the global movement for family planning. “Governments just have to make sure that what happens on the ground is what they wanted.”
And men and women, boys and girls, in turn need to make sure that their governments, as well as their private practitioners, offer them effective, comprehensive, safe and respectful services to enable them to better plan their families and their lives.