Advocacy Materials
The Importance of Voluntary Family Planning and Its Provision by Our Members
May 2011
Despite the remarkable progress made over the past four decades, the need for family planning services across a woman's life cycle is large and will continue to grow for many years to come. Many cadres of trained health providers, including doctors, midwives, nurses, clinical officers, and community health workers, play an important role worldwide in providing quality family planning services. However, basic competencies in both family planning (FP) counseling and service provision are often not consistently present in preservice education and in-service training for doctors, midwives, and nurses. This reduces the ability of these cadres to provide-and women and men to access-the full complement of FP methods and services.
International professional organizations like the International Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology (FIGO), the International Congress of Midwives (ICM), and the International Council of Nursing (ICN) provide important technical and normative guidance to health care providers and organizations around the world. They also can play a critical role as advocates for FP and long-acting and permanent methods of contraception (LA/PMs) with their global networks.
To this end, the RESPOND Project has collaborated with these organizations to strengthen their capacity to advocate, promote, and support the efforts of their members to provide FP and LA/PM services through the development of a joint consensus statement that:
- States the importance of FP (its contribution to women's empowerment and individual health, family welfare, and community and national development (Millennium Development Goal 5 and others)
- Supports the right of women to universal access to FP (as a part of sexual and reproductive health (SRH))
- Makes explicit the critical role that midwives and nurses have to play as providers and managers in FP and RH programs in delivering these universal health services, including that there be no policy or program barriers to their doing so
The consensus statement is available in English (PDF, 682KB), French (PDF, 690KB), Spanish (PDF, 690KB), and Russian (PDF, 772KB)