Reducing population growth requires improving women’s status, not just supplying contraception

Evidence

Planned childbearing is addressed in terms of families’ desired futures. Efforts to reduce the rate of population growth through family planning must address the broader issue of the role and status of women. Improving diverse aspects of people’s lives, not merely targeting contraception, achieves the desired changes. Often the problem is not access to contraception but rather psychosocial impediments to its use. The challenges are greatest in societies in which women are marginalized, disallowed aspirations, denied access to education, forced into arranged marriages and early childbearing, granted little say in their reproductive lives, and denied liberty and dignity. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2852

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the demographic transition literature and to Easterlin’s framework on fertility; also to Amartya Sen’s work on population growth and women’s agency. — connects to: Widespread contraceptive availability increases women’s sexual freedom and premarital experience.