A companion study published in the same issue by Malcolm Potts of the University of California, Berkeley, reckons that there are 80m unintended pregnancies every year. The vast majority of these result in babies. If women who wanted contraception were provided with it, 72% of these unintended pregancies would have been prevented, according to a report by the United Nations Population Fund called “Adding it Up: the Benefits of Investing in Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare”.
I think of reproductive rights as a human right. So it’s weird to hear a sort of economic argument applied to the topic. But if it helps to convince more people, then okay! It’s just a big jarring for me to think of HUMAN CHOICE as requiring another reasoning.
Mr Wire points out that if all women who wanted contraception were provided with it, it would prevent the release of 34 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide between 2010 and 2050. Given the myriad of other reasons to limit human fertility (Dr Potts notes, for example, that slowing population growth is essential if poverty is to be eradicated), your correspondent cannot help but commend the report to mandarins meeting in Bangkok on September 28th to discuss the forthcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
