UN agency warns of widening inequality
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FAILURE to give the world’s poorest women control over their bodies could widen inequality in developing countries and thwart progress toward global goals aimed at ending poverty by 2030, the United Nations Population Fund said yesterday.
Countless women and girls worldwide are denied a say in decisions about sex and childbirth, and struggle to access health services such as family planning, leaving them at risk of unwanted pregnancies and abortions, its report said.
Access to birth control allows women to delay and space births, reducing mother and child deaths, boosting economies by freeing up women to work, and leading to smaller families with parents able to spend more on their children’s health and education.
Yet many of the world’s poorest women — particularly the youngest, least educated and those living in rural areas — are missing out because such services are too few, too costly, or frowned upon by their families and communities.
This can widen the gender gap, reinforce inequality between the poorest and richest, and ultimately weaken economies, the UN fund said in its annual “State of World Population” report.
Denying women access to reproductive health services may also undermine the UN Sustainable Development Goals, a global plan to end poverty and inequality by 2030, it said.
“Inequality today is not only about the haves and have nots ... (it) is increasingly about the cans and cannots,” Natalia Kanem, the fund’s executive director, said in a statement.
“Poor women who lack the means to make their own decisions about family size or who are in poor health because of inadequate reproductive health care dominate the ranks of the cannots,” she said ahead of the launch of the report in London.
The report comes at an uncertain time for global efforts to improve family planning, with the United States, one of the UN fund’s top donors, having said in April it would stop contributing to the agency. The US contributed US$69 million in 2016.
In one of his first actions as US president, Donald Trump reinstated a policy known by critics as the “global gag” rule, which withholds US funding for international groups that perform abortions or tell women about legal options to do so.
“We are really sad that it has come to this,” Kanem said at the report’s London launch.
“There is nothing more unfair than having a woman or girl, and her desires, relegated to the bottom of the heap.”
International donors vowed to help to fill the funding gap at a summit on family planning in July, pledging US$207 million.
Yet the fund says it still needs an extra US$700 million by 2020.
Kanem said she feared this gap would hinder its ability to deliver services to those most in need.
At least 214 million women in developing nations cannot get access to contraceptives — resulting in 89 million unintended pregnancies and 48 million abortions each year.
However, a rising number of countries have pledged to boost spending on reproductive health services, as part of a Family Planning 2020 initiative — which aims to give 120 million more women access to birth control.
Studies show that every US$1 invested in family planning yields up to US$6 in savings on public services.
“When people talk about inequality, they often think about money and wealth ... but economic inequality is just the tip of the equality iceberg,” said Richard Kollodge, senior editor of the UN report.
“A new perspective which focuses on sexual and reproductive rights can help level the playing field.”
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