What is the Planet campaign?

Planet is a five-year public education campaign sponsored by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. The goal of Planet is to raise awareness of the connections between international family planning and the health of children, women and the environment. The Planet campaign consists of television and print advertising, press relations, community outreach, special events, and other activities. The campaign’s web site, http://www.familyplanet.org/, provides an international forum for discussion of, and action on, women’s reproductive health—including family planning—in various countries and diverse cultures around the world.

Who are the partners?

The Planet campaign is implemented by Save the Children and five other nonprofit organizations: CARE, the Communications Consortium Media Center, National Audubon, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and Population Action International.

What is Save the Children’s role in the campaign?

Save the Children has received generous grants from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in support of its Every Mother/Every Child campaign. The official launch of the campaign takes place on Mother’s Day 2001. A series of activities around the country will be introduced to mobilize the American public around programs and policies that will expand maternal and child healthcare, including family planning, education and economic opportunity to mothers throughout the developing world. At the end of this initiative, Save the Children hopes to dramatically reduce the number of mothers and children who are poor, illiterate, and without access to critical health care services.

Why the focus on mothers?

Because nearly 70 years of Save the Children experience has shown us that to save children, we must start by investing in their mothers. In general, when mothers are healthy, educated, and economically-empowered, so too are their children. In short, when mothers survive and thrive, children survive and thrive.

What is the connection between Save the Children’s work and international family planning?

Family planning saves children’s and women’s lives--particularly if delivered in a broad context of maternal and child health services. Throughout the developing world, millions of mothers and their children die each year due to complications from births that are too close together or too early or too late in a woman’s life. Every day, more than 31,000 under age 5 die—many from low birth weight or other pregnancy-related complications. And each year, more than 500,000 women die—at least one woman in every minute of every day—of causes related to pregnancy and childbirth; 99 percent of those women live in developing countries.

Family planning can prevent a quarter of infant and child deaths by spacing births at least two years apart—that’s nearly 3 million children’s lives saved each year. Family planning can also prevent at least one in four maternal deaths by allowing women to delay motherhood until their healthier reproductive years. In addition, family planning programs can help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases by providing condoms and other barrier methods.

For these reasons, family planning and child health has been a critical component of Save the Children’s health programs for nearly two decades. As UNICEF said in a State of the World’s Children report, “family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single technology now available to the human race.” And of the factors we studied in our State of the World’s Mothers 2000 and 2001 reports, access to family planning was identified as a key factor contributing to maternal and child survival and well-being.

What is Save the Children’s position on abortion?

Save the Children has no position or policy on abortion. Abortion is not a part of our maternal and child healthcare programs either at home or abroad. As research indicates, increased access to family planning helps prevent the need for abortions by reducing the rate of unintended pregnancies.

Don’t we already give enough overseas?

Most Americans believe the United States spends far more than it does on foreign aid. Actually less than one percent of the federal budget is devoted to foreign assistance—and less than half of that goes to organizations like Save the Children which deliver high-quality humanitarian aid programs that help give a hand up to millions of the world’s poorest people. The United States now spends less of its national wealth on helping the poor overseas than any industrialized nation.

Do these programs work?

Yes, and much of it with the leadership and know-how of the United States. Since 1960, development assistance has helped reduce infant mortality rates in developing countries by 50 percent, increase life expectancy from 46 years to 63 years, and increase primary school enrollment from 48 percent to 79 percent. Small microenterprise loans to poor women constitute one of the greatest success stories in the developing world. And more than 60 million couples in the developing world use family planning as a direct result of U.S. assistance to voluntary family planning programs. Over the past 35 years, the average number of children per family in the developing world has been reduced by one-third—from six to four children. These families are better able to feed, clothe, and educate their children.

Despite these and other breakthroughs, and at a time when the well-being of the developing world is increasingly linked to U.S. interests, Congress has cut these programs by 20 percent or more over the past five years; international family planning programs have been cut by more than one-third.