Guttmacher Releases Most Comprehensive Evidence to Date on Global Family Planning Gaps, Investment and Economic Returns

Two new studies show dual impact of family planning: saving lives and driving women’s economic empowerment

November 3, 2025

Today the Guttmacher Institute unveiled findings from two groundbreaking research initiatives revealing the most comprehensive evidence to date of the transformative impact of family planning on women’s lives—underscoring the urgent need for sustained investment in global sexual and reproductive health. The new evidence has been released at the International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP), which kicked off today in Bogotá, Colombia.

The two complementary studies—Adding It Up and FP-Impact—demonstrate that investing in comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care delivers immediate, life-saving benefits while simultaneously functioning as economic “seed funding” that expands national workforces and generates sustained economic returns.

Continued: https://www.guttmacher.org/news-release/2025/guttmacher-releases-most-comprehensive-evidence-date-global-family-planning-gaps

USAID’s reproductive health funding has saved millions of lives. Now it’s gone.

For decades, USAID’s family planning program was the main source for contraception and HIV treatment in some countries. Experts say without it, women and LGBTQ+ people will die.

Jessica Kutz
February 7, 2025

On Sunday, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, boasted that he was gutting the federal agency tasked with providing foreign aid to its poorest. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk, the tech billionaire head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, posted on his social media platform, X.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was established in 1961 to provide foreign assistance to impoverished countries around the world through food aid and humanitarian and economic development work. It is also one of the world’s largest providers of contraception through its family planning program. According to the Congressional Research Service, the agency’s funding in 2023 was about $40 billion, which represented less than 1 percent of the federal budget.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2025/02/usaid-women-lgbtq-reproductive-health-funding-pause/

Post-Roe Era Tests Abortion Laws Worldwide

As abortion comes under fire in the United States, some countries have taken a stance toward expanding access

by Mariel Ferragamo
June 5, 2024

As nations around the world have expanded access to reproductive health services, the quality, accessibility, and safety of abortion care has improved, as has maternal health. International authorities have called abortion a crucial aspect of health care.

Still, opposition to abortion remains strong in parts of the world, especially in the United States. When the United States overturned the right to abortion in 2022, the ruling rattled the nation. Yet the moment spoke to the country's paradoxical and pendulous history with abortion. Even though the United States permitted the practice for decades within its own borders, it has long restricted funding for abortion care abroad.

Continued: https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/post-roe-era-tests-abortion-laws-worldwide

In Hospitals Across Africa, A Lack Of Post-Abortion Care

March 9, 2021
PATRICK ADAMS

Some of Onikepe Owolabi's most vivid memories of medical school in her native Nigeria are of the teenage girls she saw in the emergency room of a rural hospital with complications from an unsafe abortion — painful infections that, if left untreated, can lead to permanent disability or even death.

Each time, Owolabi, now a senior research scientist with the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit reproductive rights organization in the U.S. that supports abortion rights, assisted doctors in promptly providing the girls with a group of essential obstetric services known collectively as "post-abortion care," or PAC.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/03/09/936206516/in-hospitals-across-africa-a-lack-of-post-abortion-care

Despite Widespread Support for Postabortion Care, Many Countries’ Health Systems Do Not Have the Capacity to Provide Essential Services

Despite Widespread Support for Postabortion Care, Many Countries’ Health Systems Do Not Have the Capacity to Provide Essential Services
New 10-Country Study Identifies Gaps in Postabortion Care

First published online: November 29, 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(18)30404-2

There are critical gaps in the provision of postabortion care (PAC) at facilities that offer childbirth delivery services in many countries, highlighting a disconnect between national governments’ commitments to address the consequences of unsafe abortion and the capacity of health systems to provide essential services, according to a new study published today in The Lancet Global Health. “Health Systems' Capacity to Provide Post-Abortion Care: A Multicountry Analysis Using Signal Functions,” by Guttmacher researchers Onikepe Owolabi, Ann Biddlecom and Hannah Whitehead, found an unacceptably low level of appropriate medical care provided to women who experienced complications from abortion or miscarriage and who sought treatment in one of 10 countries across three regions.

Study Summary:
Abortion-related mortality is one of the main causes of maternal mortality worldwide. Laws often restrict the provision of safe abortion care, yet post-abortion care is a service that all countries have committed to provide to manage abortion complications. There is minimal evidence on the capacity of national health systems to provide post-abortion care.

Continued: hhttps://www.guttmacher.org/article/2018/11/health-systems-capacity-provide-post-abortion-care-multicountry-analysis-using