Every Woman's Right: How Family Planning Saves Children's Lives

Allowing women and adolescent girls to plan their pregnancies improves infant survival rates and reduces maternal deaths from complications during pregnancy and childbirth, a report from Save the Children finds. According to Every Woman's Right: How Family Planning Saves Children's Lives (41 pages, PDF), enabling women to space their pregnancies at three-year intervals could help save the lives of nearly two million children annually. Moreover, with approximately fifty thousand teenage girls dying each year during pregnancy and childbirth, mostly in developing countries, access to family planning services would boost efforts to realize the Millennial Development Goals for child and maternal health as well as development. In light of those statistics, the report's authors argue that empowering women and adolescent girls to exercise their right to family planning services and modern methods of contraception has never been more important.