Empowerment and fertility, family planning, and abortion
Gipson and Upchurch [15] tried to understand intergenerational transmission of women’s empowerment by examining the influence of maternal status on the reproductive health outcomes of their daughters in the Philippines. They found that maternal empowerment was an important determinant of daughters’ timing of sexual debut, where greater empowerment led to delayed sex, regardless of whether contraception was used. However, maternal empowerment was not predictive of daughters' reports of unintended pregnancy. The authors concluded that more research is needed to better understand the intervening mechanisms between onset of sexual activity and unintended pregnancy.
While most researchers examine the impact of women’s empowerment on reproductive outcomes, Samari [16] flipped the question and innovatively investigated the impact of childbearing on women’s empowerment trajectories in Egypt. She discovered that, for a young woman, giving birth is associated with increased empowerment; the first birth and each subsequent birth predicted improvements in all measures of empowerment (individual household decision-making, joint household decision-making, and mobility), except one (financial autonomy). She also found that empowerment earlier in a woman’s life is a predictor of subsequent empowerment in life.
In her paper, McReynolds-Pérez [17] focused on Argentina, where abortion is legally restricted. Using ethnographic methods, she described the strategies used by activist healthcare providers to apply the health exception to extend the range of legal abortion. She showed how the providers conceptualized their work as opening opportunities for women to exercise their reproductive autonomy.
Mandal et al. [18] make a methodological contribution in their review of the measures of empowerment and gender-related constructs used to evaluate family planning and maternal health programs in low- and middle-income countries. Their review covered 16 program evaluations, of which only a minority used a validated measure of a gender construct. The authors recommended that future evaluations test for a clear causal pathway from program participation to an intermediary measure of gender, to the ultimate family planning or maternal health outcome that the intervention intends to improve.