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Planning Families – Empowering Women
The right to family planning has been an international human right since 1968. Since then, women and men have been able to decide more freely how many children to have, and when. This includes enabling couples to prevent or delay pregnancy as well as obtaining assistance in addressing fertility problems.
Today many millions of people all over the world are able to exercise this right to plan their families because several safe and reliable contraceptives are available to them. Some 50 years after the first oral contraceptive - "the pill" - was introduced, it is the contraceptive method of choice for many couples.
Studies have shown that age, the nature of the relationship and the woman's own body image are the main factors that determine the choice of contraceptive. One in six women over 35, for example, decides in favor of a reversible long-term method, such as a hormone-releasing intrauterine device.
Their parents saw things very differently. Prior to 1960, when the first contraceptive came onto the market in the United States, followed one year later by Germany, most people tended to trust to luck when planning their families; or they used unreliable methods such as lemon halves, which women placed over their cervix as a barrier method. It's no wonder that the arrival of the pill was nothing short of a social revolution. For the first time women were empowered to take more control and responsibility over their own fertility. Pill use was highest in industrialized countries.
But in developing countries, which play a major role in global population growth, national and international family planning programs and the use of hormonal contraceptives helped to lower the average birth rate, and raise the age at which women gave birth to their first child.
Yet in spite of the changes for the better, the United Nations Population Fund estimates that between 120 million and 150 million women in developing countries still do not have access to contraceptives.
The result is catastrophic. Currently some 25 percent of the 190 million or so pregnancies that occur every year end in abortion. More than half a million women die every year of pregnancy- or delivery-related complications.
As the world's leading supplier of hormonal contraceptives, Bayer Schering Pharma is committed to making access to family planning methods easier for women and men, irrespective of their economic situation. Bayer Schering Pharma is aware of the social responsibility that accompanies being a leader in women’s health, contraception in particular. The company provide national and international organizations with the products they need for their family planning programs in developing countries. In this way the company is supporting the efforts of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) to create universal access to fertility control methods by 2015.
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