Nicholas Kristof Quotes

If you educate women, family size tends to go down.

By improving health, empowering women, population growth comes down.

Mainly because as women's education increases all around the planet, we find that family size tends to drop.

We know that if you educate a girl, as the saying goes, you educate a nation. That girl will get married later, she will have fewer children, she's more likely to earn an income, and that income is more likely to be plowed back into the family so that the family benefits.

I'm not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they'll have, immediately the floor will rise.

In order to stabilize human population growth, we must prioritize the education of girls, the empowerment of women, the provision of ubiquitous access to the knowledge and techniques of fertility management, and the continued raising of child survival rates.

We should educate more women and girls. Because that is the surest route to controllably, manageably reducing the human population. Educated women have fewer kids. And the kids they do have are better cared for and are more successful. As I like to say, it's not one thing that we need to focus on. It's everything all at once.

Contraceptives unlock one of the most dormant, but potentially powerful assets in development: women as decision-makers. When women have the power to make choices about their families, they tend to decide precisely what demographers, economists, and development experts recommend. They invest in the long-term human capital of their families.

Targeting women is key in developing countries. It allows them to go to school, to say how many children they're going to have, which drives the issue of population and how their children will be educated. Women are the best investments in developing countries.

Empowering women by allowing them to choose when and how many children to have is not only the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to do.

When the poor know that their children will survive, when they educate their daughters, when they access family planning, they have fewer children.

World fertility surveys indicate that anywhere from one third to one half of the babies born in the Third World would not be if their mothers had access to cheap, reliable family planning, had enough personal empowerment to stand up to their husbands and relatives, and could choose their own family size.

Family planning campaigns should be increased so that the sizes of families are manageable and enjoy the best possible standard of living.

The problem of burgeoning population can be addressed if we begin with women itself. And, we need to educate them and spread awareness about birth control and family planning through TV channels and newspapers.

You'll discover in countries where women have control over their own bodies, where they have education, where they have birth control, where they have facilities and where they are literate, when those things happen, the birth rate falls.

Let's respect the dignity of women to make their own decisions about the size and timing of their families.

The only acceptable way to solve ecological problems is if you can persuade people to have fewer children. In the Victorian times, there were families of 15 children. Someone like Edward Lear, he was the last of 21 children. And so what we have to think about is offering people the alternative choice. And in the West, that's what's happening. The birth rate has been dropping steadily and still is. I'm wanting human beings to be better off so they don't view children as an insurance for the future.

China had managed to reduce their fertility to a large extent because of basic expansion of women's education, not because of the one-child family.

Unless women have, from the moment of birth, socialization for, expectations of, and preparation for a viable significant alternative to motherhood . . . women will continue to want and reproduce too many children.

Who is going to be the first to face up to the need for self-restraint in the number of children brought into the world?

UN studies conducted in more than forty developing countries show that the birth rate falls as women gain equality... I believe income-earning opportunities that empower poor women ... will have more impact on curbing population growth that the current system of "encouraging" family planning practices through intimidation tactics.. Family planning should be left to the family.

As a woman leader, I thought I brought a different kind of leadership. I was interested in women's issues, in bringing down the population growth rate... as a woman, I entered politics with an additional dimension - that of a mother.

Studies have shown that since women have had access to the pill and family planning measures, they have made huge gains in both wages and in careers that were dominated by men.

A series of studies in the 1990s and 2000s revealed that as women gained more access to education, jobs, and birth control, they had fewer children. As a result, developed countries in western Europe, Japan, and the Americas were seeing zero or negative population growth.

Today, American women bear an average of 2.2 children that live to adulthood. Across most of Europe, women bear even fewer young.