Not just child mortality alone, you need also family planning.

Mechai Viravaidya: How Mr. Condom made Thailand a better place

But we began with a family-planning program, following a very successful maternal child health activity, sets of activities. So, basically, no one would accept family planning if their children didn't survive. So the first step: get to the children, get to the mothers, and then follow up with family planning. Not just child mortality alone, you need also family planning. Now let me take you back as to why we needed to do it.

In my country, that was the case in 1974. Seven children per family. Tremendous growth at 3.3 percent. There was just no future. We needed to reduce the population growth rate. So we said, "Let's do it." The women said, "We agree. We'll use pills, but we need a doctor to prescribe the pills," and we had very, very few doctors. We didn't take no as an answer; we took no as a question. We went to the nurses and the midwives, who were also women, and did a fantastic job at explaining how to use the pill.