The United Nations Population Fund’s State of the World Population 2023 report highlights how population dynamics (both in terms of over and underpopulation) are often cited as the root cause of many of today’s challenges and that while they are important, there’s a risk of oversimplifying complex issues in some cases. For example, since half of all emissions are produced by the richest 10 percent of the world, it’s a stretch to say that the rise in emissions is due mainly to population growth.

At the same time, the authors warn such arguments can imply that fertility is a problem to be solved, in turn “reducing women’s bodies to political battlegrounds.” And so they urge a shift in the narrative so that countries can focus more on building demographic resilience by adapting to population change rather than trying to control it, adding that this includes taking a sexual and reproductive justice approach.

The following chart considers one aspect of sexual and reproductive autonomy, drawing data from the UNFPA platform to see how contraceptive rates vary around the world. While the countries with the highest share of women aged 15-49 on contraception are Finland (79 percent), Switzerland (73 percent), Canada (73 percent), the United Kingdom (72 percent), and China (71 percent), on a regional level it is Latin America and the Caribbean that comes out on top (an average contraception rate of 59 percent). It is followed by Asia and the Pacific (54 percent), while Eastern Europe and Central Asia (46 percent), East and Southern Africa (36 percent), the Arab States (34 percent) and West and Central Africa (20 percent) all sit below the world average of 50 percent.

In the United States, roughly six in ten women (61 percent) are on some form of contraception as of 2023, falling slightly below the averages of countries such as the Netherlands (63 percent), Ireland (65 percent), New Zealand (65 percent) and Brazil (67 percent). The places with the lowest contraception rates worldwide are Chad, Somalia, South Sudan, and Eritrea, all with under 10 percent of women reported to be on contraception.

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