Family Planning

On October 11, the United Nations Day of the Girl, Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) joins the international community in calling for an end to child marriage.

National President of SPA, Sandra Kanck, says child marriage violates a girl's right to self-determination, robs them of their childhood, and often condemns them to a life of poor health.

Ten million girls every year, 25,000 girls a day, become child brides. They are significantly more likely to die in childbirth, be physically abused and be infected with HIV.

SPA NSW President, Kris Spike, has had an article published in the Newcastle Herald on the 29th of October entitled Control births, feed and teach the living.

BEIJING, July 8 (Xinhuanet) -- The world's population reached 5 billion on July 11, 1987, and the United Nations set that date as World Population Day. The theme of this year's 21st World Population Day is "Everyone counts", and the activities in China will focus on the 2010 population census and emphasize the right to life. It also aims to stress the importance of efficient population control by means of collecting and analyzing the latest data so as to make an impact on decision-making and improve people's lives.

New Delhi: India, the world's second most populous country, is against controlling population growth through legislation, Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said on Wednesday.

THE Anglican Church wants Australians to have fewer children and has urged the federal government to scrap the baby bonus and cut immigration. Wading into the population debate, the General Synod of the Anglican Church has warned that current rates of population growth are unsustainable and potentially out of step with church doctrine - including the eighth commandment, ''Thou shall not steal''.

Early marriage compromises girls' development and often results in early pregnancy and social isolation. Child marriage also reinforces the vicious cycle of early marriage, low education, high fertility, and poverty. Most countries in the Middle East and North Africa region have laws on the minimum legal age for marriage, but some families take advantage of religious laws that condone an earlier age and arrange religious ceremonies, postponing the official registration until the bride reaches the legal age.

Paraguay does not seem a likely candidate for rapid fertility decline: The population is poorer, more rural, and has lower educational levels than its neighboring countries. Yet despite a large population that is traditionally hard to reach with reproductive health information and services, Paraguay recorded a remarkable increase in contraceptive use and a sharp decline in fertility over the past decade. Mary Mederios Kent, senior demographic editor at PRB, wrote this article.

DAFENG, China — When asked why she and her husband don't want a second child, Shi Xiaomei smiles at her pudgy 9-year-old son and does a quick tally of the family budget. Her salary as a cleaning lady and the income from a mahjong parlor in their spare room barely cover their son's school fees and other expenses. "With just one, we can give him nicer things. But if you tried to split what we have between two or three, they would all end up with nothing," the 34-year-old says at her home in Dafeng, a prosperous but still-rural county 185 miles (300 kilometers) north of Shanghai.

The study provides a solid foundation for furthering research on child adoption and, more specifically, on the demographic factors that shape the demand for and the availability of adoptable children. The focus of the report is on the nexus between adoption policies and trends at the national and global levels. Understanding adoption policies and their origins is all the more important today because, as adoption has become global, inconsistencies among the legal principles and traditions regarding adoption in different countries are increasingly coming to the fore.