Family planning opponents in the U.S. Congress have long sought to place burdensome restrictions on U.S. population assistance. One such restriction is the Mexico City Policy, known to its opponents as the Global Gag Rule, which has proven detrimental to America's foreign policy objectives, to family planning programs in developing countries, and to women's health.

Continued high rates of AIDS-related illness and death in some of the world's poorest countries could impose unprecedented changes in their population age structures, stunt their economic development and retard their demographic transition – the change from a population characterized by short lives and large families, to one with long lives and small families. These impacts promise to leave the most seriously AIDS-affected countries even more vulnerable to political instability and civil conflict. How the world responds to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in this decade could bear heavily upon the future of global security.

Worldwide, more than 40 million people are living with HIV or AIDS, almost half of whom are women and one-third of whom are young people aged 15 to 24. The vast majority of HIV infections are sexual and therefore, preventable. Male and female condoms are essential components of prevention efforts, and expanding and improving condom promotion and distribution is key to fighting the spread of AIDS.

The international community has repeatedly agreed to meet young people's developmental needs, including those relating to sexual and reproductive health. Yet young people often have little or no access to the information and services they need to make healthy, informed decisions about their sexual and reproductive lives.

Reproductive illnesses and unintended pregnancies undermine economic development by weakening and killing adults in the prime of their working lives, by disrupting and cutting short the lives of their children, and by placing heavy financial and social burdens on families. In most developing-country settings, much of the loss of life and human productivity that is due to poor reproductive health could be prevented with affordable and cost-effective programs.

During the last three decades of the 20th century, demographic transition - a population's shift from high to low rates of birth and death - was associated with continuous declines in the vulnerability of countries to civil conflicts (ethnic wars, antigovernment insurgencies and terrorism resulting in multiple deaths). This relationship suggests that a range of policies and programs that promote demographic transition by encouraging small, healthy and better educated families and longer lives will improve the prospects for political stability in developing countries and enhance global security in the future.

The US foreign aid program has expanded access to contraception for millions of couples in developing nations, enabling them to plan their families. The program has also helped to slow population growth rates, making an important contribution to the future quality of life on our planet. Yet the job is far from done. For global family planning efforts to fully succeed, Americans and their leaders must continue to support US population assistance.

The term-CBPE for short-refers to the linkages between services that combine aspects of natural resources conservation or similar environmental work and the provision of reproductive health services, including family planning.

The world's forests provide goods and services essential to human and planetary well-being. But forests are disappearing faster today than ever before. Due both to deforestation and human population growth, the current ratio of forests to human beings is less thn half what it was in 1960. Yet we not only need more forests, we need forests more than ever before–to protect the world's remaining plant and animal life, to prevent flooding, to slow human-induced climate change, and to provide the paper on which education and communication still depend. More efficient consumption of forest products and eventual stabilization of human population–a prospect that appears more promising today as birthrates decline–will be needed to conserve the world's forests in the coming millennium.

There are more than 100 million women and girls alive today who are affected by FGM, the vast majority of them in Africa. Some also live in parts of the Middle East and Asia. With migration, affected women and girls now also live in the United States, Europe and, presumably, other parts of the world.