The federal government made its first grants to support the provision of family planning services in 1965 as part of the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty, a move that led to a patchwork of widely varying publicly subsidized family planning programs across the country over the next several years. Since states largely controlled the little funding available under these disparate programs, ...

Copyright: © 2013. The Authors. Licensee: AOSIS OpenJournals. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Background: The United Nations Political Declaration on HIV and AIDS of 2006 stressed the need to strengthen policy and programme linkages between HIV and Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH). However, the effectiveness and best practices for strengthening SRH and ...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the evidence on the need for family planning. The available evidence on current levels of unmet need for contraceptives, fertility preferences, and the non-contraceptive benefits of family planning is reviewed. I argue that expansion of family planning programs is still needed. These programs provide couples with tools to reach their desired family size; ...

BACKGROUND The Title X family planning program provides affordable access to a range of sexual and reproductive health services, with a priority for low-income people. The disproportionate burden of unintended pregnancy, breast and cervical cancer, and sexually transmitted diseases among minority groups, teens, and young adults in the US underscore the need for affordable access to such service...

BACKGROUND Introducing a new method into family planning programs requires careful attention to ensure it meets an actual need and has a positive effect on program goals. The Standard Days Method® is a fertility awareness-based method of family planning that is being introduced into family planning programs in countries around the world. It is different from other methods offered by programs, a...

CONTEXT Recent legislative efforts to implement mandated parental involvement for minor adolescents seeking family planning services threaten the rights of adolescents younger than 18 to access reproductive health care. METHODS State and federal laws and policies pertaining to minor adolescents' rights to access services for contraception and sexually transmitted diseases are reviewed, and re...

The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID. Over the last 30 years, the Bangladesh national family planning program has mainly concentrated its promotional efforts on encouraging women to adopt family planning. Most of the grassroots workers who are responsible for delivering family planning services are women. While the government p...

A USAID-sponsored family planning project called "FALAH" (Family Advancement for Life and Health), implemented in 20 districts of Pakistan, aimed to lower unmet need for family planning by improving access to services. To enhance the quality of care offered by the public health system, the FALAH project trained 10,534 facility-based health care providers, managers, and medical college faculty m...