Women in sub-Saharan Africa often use abortion as a method of limiting their fertility and spacing births. However, it is not well understood whether having an abortion influences contraceptive behavior. The goal of this study was to examine associations between abortion history and use of a modern contraceptive method among women in Luanda, Angola. To learn more, access the paper here.
Men in the study generally supported couples’ use of contraception, especially citing socioeconomic reasons. Some had reservations stemming from perceptions that family planning could facilitate infidelity and promiscuity. They also thought family planning decisions should be made jointly. All men expressed interest in learning more about family planning, preferring dissemination from community health workers, trusted men, and current family planning users. To learn more, access the paper here.
The open access version of Bixby’s most recent publication in Social Science and Medicine – Population Health, Do Perceived Contraception Attitudes Influence Abortion Stigma? Evidence from Luanda, Angola, is now available online.
Join the OASIS Initiative (Organizing to Advance Solutions in the Sahel) and the Bixby Center for Population, Health, and Sustainability for a talk by Dr. Nouhou Abdoul Moumouni, Director of OASIS Niger and a champion for women’s empowerment and family planning in the West African Sahel.
About the Speaker:
Nouhou Abdoul Moumouni, PhD
Director, OASIS Niger
Authors: Joanna Percher
Joanna Percher will be presenting it at the Psychosocial Workshop in Denver, CO in April 24-25.
The Bixby Center’s Associate Fellow Sarah Jane Holcombe has just published an article in the journal Health Policy and Planning on advocacy by Ethiopia’s obstetrician-gynecologist society in support of the country’s 2005 reform of its law on abortion.
Globally, but particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, health professionals have significant influence in shaping national health policy, including in the often sensitive field of reproductive health. Obstetrician-gynecologists have perhaps the most clout related to reproductive health policy, given their high levels of training, social standing and male gender. However, their ob-gyn professional societies have rarely supported abortion law reform, despite its promise for reducing women’s mortality and morbidity. This study of the contributions of Ethiopia’s ob-gyn society yields several lessons for leveraging the involvement of ob-gyn involvement in reform elsewhere:
Dr. Holcombe’s earlier related work, also based on her dissertation research, focused on Ethiopian midwives’ attitudes toward providing abortion services in the wake of the country’s legal reform.
Please join us for the second Bixby Team meeting of Spring 2018. We will have a special guest presentation by Bixby internship grantee Iris Lin on her research with the Uganda Youth Development Link in Kampala, Uganda.
Talk Topic: Harnessing the power of social norms for promoting health and well-being in low-income countries
Speaker Bio:
Dr Ben Cislaghi is Assistant Professor in Social Norms at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (Centre for Gender, Health and Violence). He worked for various NGOs and International Organisations, including UNICEF, WHO, and ILO, and as a field researcher in West Africa with Stanford and Columbia Universities. In the period 2013-2016 he worked as the Director of Research, Monitoring, and Evaluation of the NGO Tostan, a leading NGO in the field of social norms change. His past research focused on how community-led development practices can help people renegotiate social norms and collaborate to increase health and gender equality, a topic he wrote on with Diane Gillespie and Gerry Mackie in Values Deliberation and Collective Action: Community Empowerment in Rural Senegal (2016, Palgrave Macmillan). He is interested in how community-based responses can achieve change in social norms and reduction in gender-based violence, and in the role of social norms among other factors in influencing people’s actions. His second book, Human Rights and Community-led development, was published with EUP in January 2018. At the LSHTM he is gathering a community of experts on social norms and gender-related harmful practices, advancing existing understanding of how norms change and how that change can be measured. He is collaborating with various NGOs (Oxfam, Save the Children, World Education) and he’s contributing to the Lancet special series on gender norms and health, the LINEA project on sexual exploitation, and several other international initiatives on social norms.
