Melinda Gates Takes The Lead Worldwide In Delivering Birth Control To Poor Women

Melinda and Bill Gates on first trip to Africa in 1993.

The commitment of the Gates Foundation to gender equity globally will surely take another uptick with the upcoming probability that the Trump administration will shut down all funding for Planned Parenthood internationally and in the US. The first order of the incoming Obama administration was to reverse the Bush administration's commitment that no taxpayer dollars fund contraception projects around the world. And Hillary Clinton as Secy of State created a new position, the Office of Global Women's Issues, to prioritize the drive for gender equality worldwide.

The strategic thinking, fact-based female half of the world's largest foundation knows: "“You empower a woman and you change the world. We know that if a woman is economically empowered inside her family, all kinds of magical things happen.”

In 2012, when the Gates Foundation announced its support of a $4.3 billion public-private partnership designed to give 120 million women in the world’s poorest countries voluntary access to contraceptives by 2020, Melinda chose multiple international public stages, ranging from a TED talk to the London Summit on Family Planning, with the goal of underlining her unyielding commitment to the issue of birth control. Her decision put the devoted Catholic at odds with her church, and she has never looked back.  “We have 220 million women asking us for contraceptives, and we’re not delivering them,” Gates says. “Because of the political controversy, we backed away from the issue as a world. And yet women are dying in childbirth because they have child after child after child, and their children are dying because they’re coming too quickly.”