On this Valentine's Day, perhaps it's time to celebrate with a gift that many of the world's women desperately want and need: reproductive health. According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), 1,000 women die every day due to pregnancy or childbirth, or one woman every 90 seconds. Ninety-nine percent of these deaths occur in the developing world, 90% in Africa and Asia. A handful of complications account for 80% of these maternal deaths -- severe bleeding, infections, high blood pressure, obstructed labor, and unsafe abortion -- and the bulk of those are preventable.

"Reproductive health, including access to the information and means to plan a family, is a human right the world's nations have recognized in various forms since 1968," says Worldwatch Institute's President Robert Engelman. "Access to family planning and other reproductive health services safeguard the lives of women and their children and promote families that are emotionally and economically healthy."

In his book, More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want, Engelman explores centuries of reproductive history and concludes that, if given the chance to do what they really want, women on average have smaller families, with childbirths later in their lives. This pattern is safer for women and children, and it promotes environmental sustainability through the slower population growth that lower fertility rates and later births bring about.

The Health of Women and Children

The UNFPA report Women and Girls in a World of 7 Billion notes that poverty, marginalization, and gender inequalities based on culture are key challenges to reproductive health. The report relays that women own less than 15% of the world's land; their wages, on average, are 17% lower than men's; and they make up 2/3 of the world's 776 million illiterate adults. Women, particularly in the developing world, must often rely on men for financial support -- so they are subject to their partners' views on contraception. These women can feel trapped in physically or emotionally abusive relationships, and marry and have children young instead of pursuing further education or employment outside the home. In the developing world, one in seven girls is married before she turns 15. Worldwide, pregnancy/childbirth complications are the leading causes of death for girls 15 to 19. Many women can't make their own decisions regarding whether or when to have children, how many to have, and how long to wait in between them. At least 40% or more of pregnancies are unplanned, with >21% of all births resulting from such pregnancies worldwide, according to estimates of the Guttmacher Institute. With access to family planning (and permission by their families and societies to use it), fewer women and children die from unsafe abortions and high-risk pregnancies.

The Health of the Planet

The UN Foundation sponsors Girl Up, an organization promoting a world where young girls can avoid the pitfalls of too-early marriage and childbearing and instead go to school, enjoy health and safety, and grow into the next generation of leaders. "When women and girls are empowered with education and the capacity to make choices about sex, marriage and childbearing, they have opportunities to realize futures as farmers, businesswomen, politicians, or whatever dream drives them," says Engelman. "These benefits ripple out from the lives of individual women and girls to their families, their communities, their nations -- and ultimately to the entire world."

In the Worldwatch report Population, Climate Change, and Women's Lives, Engelman adds that if women are given access to increased reproductive health, they are better able to more naturally control the size of their families and counterbalance the resource depletion and pollution that are exacerbated by unabated population increases. "The importance of women and the autonomy they exercise may be far greater to the climate's future than most experts and negotiators on climate change . . . have realized," he writes.

What Women Really Want

Reproductive health is not about state-mandated family size; it is about freeing women to make their own choices about when and how often to give birth. According to Engelman, in all countries where affordable access is offered to family planning resources and women have the option of safe and legal abortions, fertility rates drop to two or less children per woman. Normal for nearly half the world, that's less than the "replacement fertility" rate that fuels present and future population growth.

When women are free to make their own choices, they improve their own health and that of their families. A study by the UNFPA and the Guttmacher Institute suggests that it would take US$24 billion to fulfill unmet reproductive health needs in developing countries, several times what countries spend today. According to the report, such an investment would "provide every woman with the recommended standard of maternal and newborn care" and would "[r]educe unintended pregnancies by >66%, prevent 70% of maternal deaths, avert 44% of newborn deaths, and reduce unsafe abortion by 73%."

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The above is based on press release information from Worldwatch. For more information and for a copy of Population, Climate Change, and Women's Lives, please contact Supriya Kumar. To purchase a copy of More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want, please visit http://bit.ly/yNBZ85 .

Worldwatch is an independent research organization based in Washington, DC. that works on energy, resource, and environmental issues. The Institute's State of the World report is published annually in more than 20 languages.