By Claire Sibonney

TORONTO, July 10 (Reuters Life!) - As thousands of groups in 140 countries prepare to mark World Population Day on Friday, the United Nations is calling for more action to promote women's rights and reduce the millions of deaths resulting from unwanted pregnancies.

"The importance of World Population Day this year is to advance women's empowerment and particularly to ensure universal access to reproductive health," Purnima Mane, deputy executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) told Reuters in an interview.

World Population Day, set by the United Nations Development Programme in 1989, will be marked by events from university campuses in Afghanistan and the streets of Nepal to mosques in Yemen and a congressional debate in Washington.

According to the UNFPA, contraception can prevent 2.7 million infant deaths a year, reduce poverty, slow population growth and ease the pressure on the environment.

One of the UNFPA's targets, for developing nations to meet their needs for contraceptives by 2015, was echoed by the World Bank on Thursday, which said 51 million unplanned pregnancies occur because women lack access to birth control.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon called for governments to honor their commitments to take action.

"The rate of death for women as they give birth remains the starkest indicator of the disparity between rich and poor," Ban said in a statement.

The UNFPA says 536,000 women die every year from pregnancy-related causes, 99 percent of them in developing countries. Another 10 million women suffer injury or disability such as infection, infertility, depression and other medical complications.

EDUCATION IS KEY

Although Mane acknowledges major milestones in family planning -- since 1960 the proportion of married women in developing countries using contraception has risen to 60 percent from less than 10 percent -- she says challenges remain for broader social development and access to information.

"Providing better education to women is critical in order for them to make the right decisions, not only for themselves but also for their families and their children," she said.

Mane said the promotion of birth control, gender equality and reproductive health are inclusive of religious groups.

"There are discussions regarding contraception," she said. "They can work on parts of the agenda that they are comfortable with."

Fewer than 5 percent of the poorest young people in developing countries use modern contraception, with the largest needs in Africa and South Asia.

In Afghanistan, for example, only 4 percent of people use any sort of contraceptives and 78 percent have never even heard of family planning, according the UNFPA.

It also said Afghanistan has among the highest fertility rates in the world with 6.7 children per women, with almost 15 percent of infants dying and mothers having a 1-in-8 chance of dying in childbirth.

"If tomorrow we could pledge to continue to work on this area to protect the health of women, mothers and their babies and to ensure that families have the right to decide on spacing and timing of their children, I think we would make major headway," said Mane. (Editing by John O'Callaghan)

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