Family Planning

The U.S. government has supported international family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH) efforts for 50 years and is one of the largest donors to FP/RH in the world. This brief provides an overview of U.S. funding for FP/RH, including trends in bilateral and multilateral funding and top country recipients of U.S. funding, and places the U.S. within the larger context of overall donor support for the sector.

The 2016 Survey of Americans on the U.S. Role in Global Health is the latest in a series of surveys designed, conducted, and analyzed by the Kaiser Family Foundation in order to shed light on the American public’s perceptions, knowledge, and attitudes about the role of the United States in efforts to improve health for people in developing countries. This most recent survey updates trends on Americans’ perceptions of the most urgent problems facing developing countries, views on U.S. spending on health, and U.S. priorities for women’s health in developing countries. It also explores new questions on Americans’ awareness of the Zika virus outbreak and recent U.S. efforts to combat the outbreak both at home and in developing countries.

As the U.S. Supreme Court gears up to hear a new round of legal challenges to the ACA’s contraceptive coverage requirement, a new Kaiser Family Foundation data note finds 10 percent of nonprofits with more than 1,000 employees have requested an “accommodation” to the health law’s birth control requirement. Overall,…

In this Medium post, Alina Salganicoff outlines the legal arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court case Zubik v. Burwell and discusses what the case could mean for contraceptive coverage.

In this post on The Huffington Post, Alina Salganicoff and Laurie Sobel offer a Q&A on “contraceptive-only” plans, an approach mentioned during oral arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court case Zubik v. Burwell. In the Zubik case, a group of religiously affiliated nonprofits with religious objections to providing birth control coverage seek an exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s provision requiring most plans to offer such coverage without cost-sharing.

These reports track funding levels of the donor governments that collectively provide the bulk of international assistance for family planning activities and is part of an effort by KFF that began after the London Summit on Family Planning in 2012. It presents their bilateral assistance to low- and middle-income countries as well as contributions to UNFPA.

On March 23, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear Zubik v. Burwell, legal challenges brought by nonprofit corporations challenging the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage requirement. The 2014 Hobby Lobby decision established that certain firms with religious beliefs should be relieved of the requirement of paying for contraceptive coverage. In this case, religious nonprofits are objecting to the regulations that the Obama Administration has developed to accommodate their religious objections to birth control, claiming it still burdens their religious beliefs. After the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, this already complicated case has taken on yet an additional question. Given that the Court will be operating with only 8 Justices, what would be the impact of a tie (4-4) decision? To address the legal and policy questions raised by the case, the Kaiser Family Foundation will hold an interactive web briefing exclusively for journalists.

The rapid spread of the Zika virus in the Latin America and the Caribbean region, the appearances of cases of Zika in the United States, and the association between Zika infection and serious birth defects has generated attention and concern among the public, policymakers, and the media. The WHO declared…

This factsheet reviews the types of sex education models and state policies surrounding them, the major sources of federal funding for both abstinence and safer sex education, and summarizes the research on impact of these programs on teen sexual behavior.