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Family Planning in Developing Countries
An Unfinished Success Story
Excerpt: Recently, commentators in several prominent U.S. publications have declared that the population explosion is over and concluded that population growth is no longer a serious policy issue. "The population boom is a bust," declares one.[2] One statistic commonly cited as evidence of this is the global decline in fertility rates (the number of children born per woman). It is true that fertility worldwide has fallen from about six in 1950 to around three in 1998. Furthermore, between the early 1960s and 1998, fertility rates in the developing world have declined from 6.1 to 3.3. The sharpest declines occurred in East Asia — from 5.9 to 1.8 — and Latin America — 6.0 to 3.0.[3] United Nations projections suggest that the world's population could begin to decline in about 50 years. If global fertility has declined so sharply, should the United States and other donor countries continue to invest in overseas population assistance programs, particularly family planning? After all, given these trends, isn't the work of family planning finished?
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This paper was supported by funding from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the United Nations Population Fund.
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