Respecting, Protecting, and Fulfilling Informed Choice and Rights

In September 2012, the RESPOND Project led an international consultation entitled “A Fine Balance: Contraceptive Choice in the 21st Century” at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. Eighteen diverse, multidisciplinary global experts representing 11 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and North America participated. Through a lens of female sterilization, participants explored the challenge of ensuring informed choice in family planning programs and factors that affect people’s access to family planning options and their ability to exercise their right to choose. Read the meeting highlights (PDF, 975 KB).

RESPOND’s consultation dovetailed with the July 2012 London Summit on Family Planning (FP2020), which attracted the attention of and led to partnerships with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation via the Futures Group, as well as with The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (leveraging a total of more than $600,000). Through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation–funded partnership with the Futures Group, RESPOND cocreated a conceptual framework and paper entitled Voluntary Family Planning Programs That Respect, Protect, and Fulfill Human Rights(PDF, 2.0MB), an accompanying User’s Guide (PDF, 8.5 MB), and a systematic review of tools (PDF, 6.9 MB) that support voluntary family planning programs that respect, protect, and fulfill human rights.

With leveraged funding from the Hewlett Foundation, RESPOND also developed Checkpoints for Choice: An Orientation and Resource Package (forthcoming). This document takes a closer look at the concept of voluntarism—one component of a rights-based approach—and helps stakeholders understand the client’s experience and ability to make full, free, and informed choices about family planning. Informed choice and rights are central tenets for all of RESPOND’s work.

To build on the momentum for dialogue about choice and rights in FP programming generated by the consultation, RESPOND launched and sustained a blog, Champions4Choice, to share ideas, experience, events, new evidence, and resources related to choice and rights in FP.

In addition to the materials listed above, this archive contains project briefs, studies, advocacy materials, and tools focusing specifically on choice and its application to programming organized into two sections: ensuring voluntary, rights-based family planning and addressing unmet need.

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This web site was made possible by the generous support of the American people through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), under the terms of the cooperative agreement GPO-A-000-08-00007-00. The information provided on this web site is not official U.S. Government information and does not represent the views or positions of the USAID or the U.S. Government.

The RESPOND Project Digital Archive, Version 2.0