Please feel free to pick out whatever sentences and paragraphs that match your sentiments for your own letter to your representatives. Bruce Sundquist ... May 24, 2000
I wish to appeal for your support for increasing US foreign aid for international family planning. President Clinton's proposed FY2001 budget includes $541.6 million for international family planning--an increase over FY2000 that would return the US to the funding level of FY1995. Several bills have been introduced which, if passed, would strengthen and restore the integrity of international family planning programs, e.g. HR3634, HR4211, HR3826, S2387.
In terms of protecting the global environment, reducing military conflicts, enhancing quality of life, and promoting democracy and political-, social-, economic- and military stability in the Third World, nothing comes before Congress that can match the importance of US assistance to international family planning.
US expenditures on international family planning services are wise and profitable investments in terms of reducing the risks in the First World's loans to, and investments in, the Third World. Some figures below support this.
Making family planning services widely available to all who want them is one of the surest ways to foster self-sufficiency, promote economic, political and social stability, promote preventive health care and basic education, nurture strong and healthy families, and enhance the quality of life for all of us.
Population assistance is consistently supported by Americans in public opinion polls. 72% of US citizens think that population is a critical issue. 72% of Americans believe their government should make contraception available to all.
A 1/99 report by the nonprofit Alan Guttmacher Institute found that, globally, 38% of all pregnancies are unplanned. As a result, the average woman has 1.05 abortions in her life-time. Better access to family planning services and contraceptives could significantly reduce this huge number of abortions. Global population growth could be reduced from the current 79 million/year (1.3%/year) to under 21 million/year (under 0.35%/year) if family-planning information, services and products were universally available. More than 60 of the world's 190 or so countries are projected to double their populations in the next 30 years. These 60 are invariably poor nations already facing serious economic, environmental, public-health, political, social and other problems.
Nearly 230 million women world-wide--roughly one in 6 women of reproductive age--still need of modern contraceptive methods to postpone or avoid future child-bearing. Access to contraceptives is still inadequate in 50 of the 88 developing countries examined in a 1997 study "Contraceptive Choices: World-wide Access to Family Planning" by Population Action International.
75,000 women die annually attempting to abort an unwanted pregnancy themselves or with the help of an untrained and unsafe provider. These deaths render at least one million children motherless annually. UNICEF estimates that for every woman who dies, "approximately 30 more incur injuries, infections and disabilities which are usually untreated and unspoken of, and which are often humiliating and painful, debilitating and life-long." According to the World Health Organization, 500,000 women die every year as a result of pregnancy and child-birth; of those, at least 70,000 deaths are due to unsafe (usually illegal) abortion. Many of these abortions and deaths would not have occurred had better access to contraception been possible.
Sincerely,