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Healthy Families Healthy Planet

The Healthy Families, Healthy Planet initiative, funded by a grant from the United Nations Foundation, works to educate and mobilize United Methodists in the U.S. on the importance of maternal health and international family planning. Through grassroots education with targeted annual conferences and advocacy efforts with policy makers, the goal of the project is to achieve higher levels of foreign aid for international family planning through the U.S. government.

Healthy Families, Healthy Planet is a program initiative of the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society. The General Board of Church and Society has applied for a second year of funding to continue the Healthy Families, Healthy Planet project for an additional year.

Five (5) key reasons for undertaking the initiative:

• Every minute a woman in sub-Saharan Africa dies from complications during pregnancy or childbirth. Nearly all of the annual 536,000 maternal deaths worldwide occur in the developing world.
• More than 200 million women want to avoid pregnancy worldwide, but lack a family-planning method.
• Investing in family planning reduces unintended pregnancy and increases health.
• When a woman delays pregnancy at least two years after the birth of her previous child, she is much more likely to have a healthy pregnancy and birth.
• By empowering women and men to make healthy decisions about how to space their children and determine their family size, family planning helps create healthier lives for themselves and for their children.

Read the related Social Principles and Resolutions.