Domestic violence laws and women’s unmet need for family planning: Quasi-experimental evidence from Africa

Reprod Health. 2025 Apr 26;22(1):60. doi: 10.1186/s12978-025-02011-3.ABSTRACTBACKGROUND: Approximately 164 million women report an unmet need for family planning globally. This has far-reaching consequences for the health of women and their children. Women’s exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) is strongly linked to increased unmet need as IPV likely affects both women’s desire for contraception and their ability to access it. Around 245 million women were subject to physical and/or sexual IPV by an intimate partner in the past twelve months alone, making it the most common form of violence against women. Yet, laws that prohibit domestic violence (DV) are not universal and countries actively debate whether legal provisions are effective in deterring and reducing its harmful impacts. This study examines the impact of DV laws on women’s unmet need for family planning.METHODS: We built new data on DV laws adoption in Africa and used the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data collected between 2000 and 2021 across 23 African countries for outcomes data. Exploiting the staggered adoption of DV laws across the continent, we used a difference-in-differences study design to estimate the impact of DV laws in the treated countries compared to countries without such laws.RESULTS: We find that DV laws reduced women’s unmet need for family planning by 6.2% points, 95% CI [- 9.2, – 3.2], a 20.5% reduction from the mean. Positive impacts were observed in 6 countries across multiple model specifications. While the impacts were largely broad-based across wealth, age, geography, and education categories, we found no significant impacts for women younger than 20 years of age and those without formal education. These findings were robust to alternative model specifications.CONCLUSIONS: Our findings demonstrate that countries can significantly benefit from prohibiting DV as a fundamental step towards addressing women’s unmet need for family planning and promoting their reproductive health. While fully addressing IPV and women’s unmet need may require a range of complementary interventions, especially among marginalized populations, DV laws play a crucial role in improving women’s control over their reproductive health.PMID:40287771 | DOI:10.1186/s12978-025-02011-3

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