Population-growth symposium

The UCL Institute for Global Health's 9th Symposium, 'Straight Talking: Population growth and family planning', was held on 16 March 2009. Malcolm Potts, Bixby Professor of Population & Family Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, began by posing two questions: Is rapid population growth a problem' And, if so, can it be slowed through voluntary means' The main challenge is to lower fertility rates through family planning (in Professor Potts? definition, modern contraception and safe abortion), for which there is a huge unmet need across the world. The barriers to family planning ' such as restrictions on access to oral contraceptives and safe abortion ' caused a huge burden of ill-health, borne largely by poor women. Globally, the poorest people suffered most from lack of access to voluntary family planning. While coercive practices in some countries had given family-planning programmes a bad name, other voluntary programmes - such as in Iran - had proved effective at reducing population growth in a short space of time. He asserted that the just approach to family planning ' treating people with trust and respect, and offering them a range of options to reduce unwanted pregnancies ' was also the most effective at slowing population growth. Symposium panel member Ruth Mace, UCL Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology, noted that a key factor influencing choices about how many children to have was the perception of the likelihood of those children's success.