The interlinking of the poverty that exists in the world still and the fact that living in that poverty is one of the preconditions for wanting larger family sizes is one of the things that we really have to occupy ourselves with. We can cherish our children, not just at the age where we have been looking at where they need immunization, where they need breast feeding, where they need all of the factors that have gone into the child health revolution but a little bit beyond we can take that into cherishing adolescents so that they in turn do not become parents, so that girls are looked after, so that girls do not go off screened after they have been immunized and in particular get to school, become cherished and become cherished equally within families and within communities. If all of this sounds familiar it's because exactly the same ingredients that go into a child health and survival revolution are those that go into the decisions on the personal, the community, the village, the national level that families can afford to have fewer children. Sounds surprising doesn't it because most people talk about how can families afford to have more children, but in fact for very poor families the reality is that families can take the chance to have fewer children because they are confident that their children will survive and that's the linkage between lower infant mortality rates and the need to have less children on a per family basis because they will not need those children to become workers at an early age and can in fact get rid of the scourge of child labor at the same time that we start to solve some of our worries about ongoing population. Family planning is important Thirty- five percent because there are still 140 million women and families around the world that need services extended to them.
Family planning is important.
Fifteen percent because we still need to work on infant mortality rates, on women's roles, on getting and keeping girls in school, on credit for women and on giving women alternatives to a better life than those that can be achieve through fertility. Forty to fifty percent because the age of marriage, because of adolescents, because we don't look out for adolescents, particularly not adolescent girls. When a girl is educated and has more than ten years of school she will have three children. When she has no education the number that she will have across the globe is closer to six. If we want to protect our planet.