Family planning is back on the international development agenda: why should New Zealand play a greater role in the Pacific?

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, access to comprehensive family planning services has been widely recognised as a basic human right. Despite this, family planning has been and remains one of the most under-resourced and politically sensitive development issues of our time. As a consequence, it is estimated that this year (2012), some 222 million women in the developing world have an unmet need for family planning. Estimates indicate that meeting this need would cost $US8.1 billion and prevent 54 million unintended pregnancies, more than 79,000 maternal deaths and 1.1 million infant deaths (Singh and Darroch, 2012).