Nearly Half of All Pregnancies Worldwide are Unintended and 60% of those end in abortion [View all]

Nearly Half of All Pregnancies Worldwide are Unintended and 60% of those end in abortion

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unseen-crisis-nearly-half-all-pregnancies-worldwide-unintended-jalan

UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency, is sounding the alarm on a human rights crisis that has ramifications for women, societies, and the world. Its 2022 State of World Population report, Seeing the Unseen: The case for action in the neglected crisis of unintended pregnancy, estimates that nearly half of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended — totaling 121 million unintended pregnancies each year. The report builds on new data from the Guttmacher Institute and the World Health Organization (WHO) that outlines the first-ever estimates of unintended pregnancy and abortion at the country level, highlighting major disparities across 150 countries in access to quality sexual and reproductive health care.

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Myriad factors, rooted in gender inequality, are stripping people of their fundamental decision-making power over their bodies. This includes a lack of quality sexual and reproductive health care and information, including preferred methods of contraception, as well as harmful societal norms or stigma around reproduction and bodily autonomy, intimate partner or sexual violence or coercion, and harmful laws and policies. These factors are compounded for people who are already marginalized due to identifiers such as age, marital status, rural or urban dwelling, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, income and education level, or ability.

Unsurprisingly, then, countries with higher rates of gender inequality had higher rates of unintended pregnancy, with just 57% of women able to make their own decisions over their sexual and reproductive health and rights. In a world where nearly 1 in 3 young women are giving birth before the age of 20, can a person imagine a life where pregnancy is a choice, not a given? Do their reproductive intentions even matter?

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The true scope of the impacts of unintended pregnancy are wide-ranging and impossible to quantify. What we can attempt to measure, however, is alarming: More than 60 percent of unintended pregnancies end in abortion, and nearly half of those abortions are unsafe, and directly lead to five to 13 percent of all maternal deaths worldwide — what the report calls a public health emergency.