Contraception use grows in low-income countries

A record number of women and girls in the world's poorest countries are using modern contraception, according to a new report from Family Planning 2020. In 2018, 317 million women and girls in 69 low-income countries were using contraception, up from 271 million in 2012. The authors of the report estimate that increase helped to prevent more than 119 million unintended pregnancies and 20 million unsafe abortions from July 2017 to July 2018. But the authors also found that millions of women who want to prevent pregnancy and live in those countries — many of them in sub-Saharan Africa — still can't access contraception.