After decades of careful development and testing, Norplant implants are taking their place as the newest choice among family planning methods. Family planning programs now face important decisions about whether to offer Norplant and how to offer it in ways that meet clients' needs. In women STDs can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, causing lifelong pain, infertility, and extopic pregnancy, which can kill. Children are born with blinding eye infections. Men are left infertile.
People die of advanced stages of syphilis.
Furthermore, STDs multiply the transmissibility of HIV, the AIDS virus, as much as ninefold. A broad array of social and economic changes is necessary to overcome the poverty, lack of education, and limited control over their own lives that often keep women's hopes from coming time. But women can take an important step forward when they make their own reproductive choices-about marriage, sex, childbearing, and contraception. Making Programs Work Over the past 30 years, family planning programs have helped millions of people to have the smaller families that they want. As programs have learned how to meet people's needs, contraceptive use has spread rapidly.