Do you care about health and human rights? Girls' and women's empowerment? Sustainable development?

If so, join over 40,000 members and hundreds of thousands of supporters of Population Connection to work together to improve the quality of life for people around the world and the future of our planet.

Population Connection has been America’s grassroots population organization since its founding as Zero Population Growth—or ZPG—in 1968. Although we changed our name in 2002, our mission remains the same. We advocate to achieve population stabilization through better access to and increased education about voluntary family planning.

There are an estimated 218 million women in the developing world who want to avoid getting pregnant but who aren’t using a modern method of contraception. In the United States, where per capita emissions and consumption of natural resources is extremely high, an estimated 45% of pregnancies are unintended.

Population Connection works with the White House and the United States Congress to increase domestic and international family planning funding to the levels required to eliminate unintended pregnancy around the world. We are not a medical service provider—we are a grassroots movement and a powerful force for the collective voices of Americans concerned about runaway population growth.

Our sister organization, Population Connection Action Fund, gets even more involved in policy matters, so if that’s where your interests most lie, click the button below!

 

Visit Population Connection Action Fund

Our Legislative Priorities

Since 1984, the rights and welfare of women in the developing world have been dependent on who is sitting in the White House. That can change.

The Global Gag Rule, when it is in effect, disqualifies some of the most effective and experienced family planning providers in the world from receiving U.S. assistance. Whether the policy is in place is a matter of life and death for women around the world. Lack of access to family planning information and services puts the lives and health of women at risk for no defensible reason. Millions of these women experience unintended pregnancies, and tens of thousands of them die from complications from pregnancies every year, including by unsafe abortion.

The Global Health, Empowerment and Rights Act (H.R.1838, S.1098) would end this cruel uncertainty by barring a future administration from unilaterally imposing the Global Gag Rule. Passage of this legislation is critical to ensure the stability of family planning programs. All members of Congress must do whatever they can to support this important bill.

It is vital to ensure that women have access to the tools and information they need to protect their health and exercise their rights. The Global HER Act will help ensure that women worldwide have access to the full range of family planning information and services they need.

Since 1973, the Helms Amendment has prohibited the use of U.S. foreign assistance for abortion overseas. The law specifically bars the use of U.S. foreign aid for “abortion as a method of family planning,” but the U.S. government has always treated the amendment as a blanket ban on funding abortion for any reason.

The Abortion is Health Care Everywhere Act (H.R.1723, S.929) would repeal the Helms Amendment.

It’s time to repeal Helms once and for all. It has no benefit to foreign policy, to global health, to development, or, really to anything at all. It is, in fact, simply a relic of domestic abortion politics. And the domestic politics of abortion are totally divorced from the reality of the life that women struggling with unwanted pregnancies in the developing world face.

United States funding for international family planning and reproductive health has been stagnant at $607.5 million for years and is 45% below the 1995 level (in constant dollars). Since then, the number of women of reproductive age in the developing world has grown by over 540 million.

Today, 218 million women in the developing world want to prevent or delay pregnancy but have an unmet need for modern contraception. Each year, there are approximately 111 million unintended pregnancies in the developing world.

This huge unmet need for family planning contributes to a host of devastating consequences for the entire world: resource insecurity, social instability, and maternal and infant mortality. If the United States wants to meet these and other 21st century challenges, then it must make a real investment in family planning and reproductive health.

The U.S. must invest at least $1.74 billion in international family planning and reproductive health programs, including $116 million for UNFPA. This figure represents the United States’ pledged share of the total cost of eliminating unmet need for family planning worldwide. It is a sound investment in our future.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is an essential agency that provides people in more than 150 countries around the globe with desperately-needed reproductive and maternal health services, including family planning, safe delivery, and treatment of obstetric fistula. Programs also work to prevent child marriage, gender-based violence, female genital mutilation, and sex-selective abortion and infanticide.

UNFPA is often the first agency on the ground after a natural disaster or humanitarian crisis. Health workers set up ad hoc clinics and deploy mobile units to reach people in refugee camps and other temporary shelters with family planning, safe delivery services, menstrual dignity kits, and clinical management of rape (which is unfortunately widespread in crisis settings) and STIs.

UNFPA is a cost-effective service provider that reaches millions of people around the world with critical health care—the agency saves lives and supports our broader diplomatic, development, and national security priorities.

The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, ending the federal right to abortion up to the point of fetal viability. Abortion laws are now determined by states, with rights and access varying widely. To see an updated list of state abortion policies, visit the Guttmacher Institute.

There is a bill in both houses of Congress that would reinstate the right to abortion nationwide: the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA).