Many women around the world can not decide who they marry, who they have sex with, and how many children they have. A study by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) now estimates how many women are affected by it. Thus, more than 200 million women worldwide have no access to contraceptives, although they actually want to prevent pregnancy.
The analysis applies to 51 developed and developing countries for which such data were available. Thus, only 57 percent of women living in relationships have access to contraceptives and health care and can freely decide on the sexual relationship with their partner.
Women in the surveyed countries therefore have the greatest freedom in Ukraine and the Philippines, where 81 percent of women can decide on their sex life and pregnancies. In Mali, Niger and Senegal, on the other hand, this is true for only seven percent of women - the lowest value in the comparison between the 51 countries studied. Germany was not included in the investigation.
The poorer the women are, the report shows, the smaller is their chance to get the funds - both in developed and developing countries. UNFPA CEO Natalia Kanem said that without this access, women would lose the power to make decisions about their own bodies. For example, if they wanted to get pregnant. That's why they could not shape their own future.
Overall, significantly more women now have access to contraception than they did fifty years ago. If it was still 24 percent in 1969, the number increased to 58 percent in 2019, the researchers estimate.