Impact of women empowerment on access to emergency contraception

The empowerment of women has been recognized as a basic human right and also as imperative for national development. Women empowerment is essential to ensure a better quality of life in the context of prevailing socio-economic and political environment. The present paper explored how empowerment of women influences the use of emergency contraception if women experience unprotected intercourse. It is hypothesized that enjoying empowerment by women is associated with use of emergency contraception. Secondary data from the 2003 Women's Follow up Survey on Emergency Contraception by Population Council has been analyzed. A total of 620 women who had experienced unprotected intercourse during last nine months of survey have been chosen for the study. In addition, 20 in-depth interviews were carried out to complement the quantitative findings. A number of questions were considered as a measure of women empowerment. For example, socio economic status (SES) of household, education and occupation of women, enhanced husband-wife communication on reproduction, member of a society/micro credit program, mobility, household decision making authority, health seeking autonomy and financial autonomy. Logistic regression model was used to assess the relationship between emergency contraception and women empowerment. The results clearly show that women who had enjoyed empowerment had more access to use emergency contraception to prevent possible unwanted pregnancy.