In 1979, the Chinese government introduced the One-child Policy for the purpose of controlling population growth. Thirty years later, the fertility rate in China has declined to a very low level and one-child families have become the norm. At the same time, the consequences of low fertility rates have emerged. In 2015, the government announced a new policy that encouraged couples to have two ch...

International Family Planning Perspectives Although governments develop family planning policies to guide program design and implementation, these policies can have both intended and unintended consequences. As a result, policies may need periodic revision to achieve the desired outcomes. Over the last two decades, the government of Peru has instituted a series of laws and policies designed to ...

The extent to which China’s family planning policy has driven its fertility transition over the past decades is debatable. The disagreement is partly sourced from the different ways of measuring the policy. Most existing measures, constructed on the policy history, generally, do not include complete secular and cross-sectional policy variations, fail to heterogeneously reflect people’s exposure...

Although China's family planning programme is often referred to in the singular, most notably the One-Child policy, in reality there have been a number of different policies in place simultaneously, targeted at different sub-populations characterized by region and socioeconomic conditions. This study attempted to systematically assess the differential impact of China's family planning programme...

The article by Potts et al, “The Pill is Mightier than the Sword,” points out that family planning has an important role to play in building peace by increasing women’s empowerment and their agency, ultimately helping peacebuilding efforts. Evidence has demonstrated that family planning programs are cost effective, produce quick results, help women and couples meet their desired fertility level...

International Family Planning Perspectives As a result of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, reproductive health policy has expanded to include a more comprehensive view of health and development. No longer merely a response to concerns about the world’s expanding population, reproductive health policy now addresses issues that reflect the needs of ...

Policies relating to contraceptive services (population, family planning and reproductive health policies) often receive weak or fluctuating levels of commitment from national policy elites in Southern countries, leading to slow policy evolution and undermining implementation. This is true of Kenya, despite the government's early progress in committing to population and reproductive health poli...