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This is a guest post by Emma Welch on the blog, "Politics, Power, and Preventive Action."
The report marks the first time that the UN explicitly described family planning—defined as the ability to plan for the number of children and timing of pregnancies and childbearing through the use of contraceptive methods, excluding abortion—as a universal human right, equal to those found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The report took one step further, declaring that the imposition of legal, financial, and cultural barriers to contraception and other family planning measures constitutes an infringement of women's rights.
Recent statistics show that an estimated 222 million women of reproductive age in developing countries have an unmet need for contraception. In many cases, there are strong cultural or societal norms that oppose the use of modern contraceptives, leading to uneven access to supplies and poor quality of health services. In other cases, the costs of modern contraceptives in developing countries are prohibitively high. As a result of these factors and more, women who want to avoid pregnancy but do not use a modern method account for 82 percent of unintended pregnancies in developing countries.
