Even with recent cuts, this country leads 20 other donor nations in both the number and expertise of its workers, many of them with non-profit groups such as AVSC International, CARE, Pathfinder International, and Save the Children. Family planning saves lives. By spacing births, family planning lowers mortality among bother women and children. Use of family planning can also help reduce the toll of repeated pregnancy and childbirth on women's health. Currently an estimated 600,000 women die annually from pregnancy-related causes.
Family planning can help reduce both abortions and deaths from unsafe abortion.
The recent experience of Russia and several Eastern European countries provides evidence that increased use of family planning helps reduce reliance on abortion. As a result of abortions performed under unsafe conditions, more than 75,000 women die annually, roughly one of every seven pregnancy-related deaths. At the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, more than 150 countries agreed that unsafe abortion was a major public health problem. Family planning supports U.S. goals. It supports overall good health, an important consequence in an era of diseases that know no borders.