In Conclusion...

What $10,000 Can Buy

Back in 1992 my friends and I gave about $10,000 to PPFA-FPIA. (For a short description of PPFA go back to the Family Planning Organizations page.) I'm going to speculate about just what that money helped accomplish, to give you some idea of what $10,000 can buy. I can't hope to offer accurate numbers here, but I'm going to go ahead and make some rough estimates because I think this is important, and because I think uncertain data is better than no data at all. Please keep in mind that these are very rough guesses -- I wouldn't be surprised if some of these figures are off by a factor of five:

I believe our $10,000 given to PPFA-FPIA accomplished all of the following:

• purchased a one year supply of contraceptives for maybe 600 couples (e.g. 10,000 condoms, 3,000 cycles of oral contraceptives, and 100 IUDs), and
  
• covered the costs involved in running the clinics that distribute these contraceptives (e.g. paying staff, renting space, transporting contraceptives, printing literature, etc.), and
  
• prevented maybe a couple hundred abortions, and
  
• funded a small number of abortions, and
  
• probably saved one woman's life, by preventing fatal reproductive health related problems (e.g. a woman killing herself from a self-induced abortion), and
  
• saved maybe five women from being handicapped by unsafe abortions (e.g. accidentally sterilizing themselves), and
  
• prevented maybe a couple hundred cases of illness and injury from pregnancy complications, and
  
• reduced, by one or two thousand, the absolute size of world population in 2050, and
  
• reduced, by perhaps 30 or 60, the number of children who will die in the remainder of my lifetime for lack of sufficient food or clean water, and
  
• reduced, by perhaps 100,000 tons, the amount of topsoil that will be lost in my lifetime
  
• and so on...
  

In Conclusion...

The decisions I made between 1992 and 1995 will probably help to save several women's lives, and will almost certainly have a profound positive influence on the lives of hundreds of people. I plan to continue working on this project in the coming years, learning more about my world and helping to make it a happier, safer, more humane place to live. I hope you'll join me on this journey.

Sincerely,

Brian Douglas Skinner

You can copy freely from this site. This work has been dedicated to the Public Domain by the author, Brian Douglas Skinner.