Additional Investments in Family Planning Would Save Developing Countries More Than $11 Billion a Year — Access to family planning is an essential human right that unlocks unprecedented rewards for economic development, says new UNFPA report. – UNFPA REPORT
TAKE A BOW Secretary Clinton, who began this push in 1995 as first lady when she declared human rights are women’s rights, which begins with planning your family. The UNFPA report is non-binding and won’t impact law internationally, but the statement is a start in a new direction, however long it takes to manifest.
The U.N. Population Report declares in it’s title “BY CHOICE, NOT BY CHANCE,” a call for self-determination, empowerment and reproductive freedom for women across the globe.
The caterwauling from the right will begin in 3,2..
“Family planning has a positive multiplier effect on development,” Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the fund, said in a written statement. “Not only does the ability for a couple to choose when and how many children to have help lift nations out of poverty, but it is also one of the most effective means of empowering women. Women who use contraception are generally healthier, better educated, more empowered in their households and communities and more economically productive. Women’s increased labor-force participation boosts nations’ economies.”
The report effectively declares that legal, cultural and financial barriers to accessing contraception and other family planning measures are an infringement of women’s rights.
This declaration, the statement itself, is the most important move in women’s self-determination globally since Hillary Rodham Clinton’s speech in China so many years ago. It’s why her statement of human rights are women’s rights begins the book I wrote about her 20-year rise and the difficulties she had making her mark.
It is not by accident that this report came during Secretary Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, which was empowered by President Obama, who, even with his faults on putting politics above science in the importance of Plan B to young women especially, as well as the damage of codifying the Hyde Amendment into law, remains on the whole a great champion of women’s self-determination.
It’s the Hillary Effect.