Peter Belden joined the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in July 2005. He brings with him fifteen years of experience focused on population and reproductive health. Before coming to the Foundation, Peter managed a Planned Parenthood clinic in San Mateo, CA, leading fourteen staff serving over one thousand family planning clients each month. Prior to that, Peter served for two years as Director of Public Affairs for Planned Parenthood Mar Monte in San Jose, California. Peter has also worked abroad, spending a summer in Mali at Population Services International, where he wrote a marketing plan and developed indicators for a franchising pilot project. During his two-year tenure as a fellow at the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) Office of Population, in Washington, D.C., Peter traveled in India, Nepal, and Kenya to evaluate projects in those countries. After completing the fellowship at USAID Peter was hired as the National Wildlife Federation's Population Specialist. Peter is a member of the Board of Directors of Teen Success and the California Family Health Council and serves as Co-Chair of the Population Working Group for the Funders Network on Population, Reproductive Health & Rights. He previously served as Chair of the Board of Directors of NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia, Board Fellow at Acterra, Population Issue Chair for the Virginia Chapter of the Sierra Club, and a member of the Sierra Club's National Population Mentors Committee. Peter received an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford and a BA with honors from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. Peter is fluent in French and knows just enough Mandarin Chinese to get into trouble. He enjoys obscure sports, particularly squash and windsurfing.
The copper IUD, known as Paragard in the US, is an overlooked option which offers a number of benefits over EC pills.
Doctors cannot restrict the treatments they mention to only those that they themselves offer. And yet this is what often happens with emergency contraception. Women are not told about the most effective option.
Based on conversations I’ve had with people across the field, it’s clear that the pro-choice movement in the United States is ready for an expanded set of goals for abortion that go beyond safe, legal, and rare.
Did you know that for emergency contraception (EC), the copper IUD is more than 99 percent effective?
It happens frequently when I meet someone new. We each say what work we do, and then he or she says, “You are a man. Why are you interested in family planning?”
