For Melinda Gates, Birth Control Is Women’s Way Out of Poverty
we not only believe in, we use in the United States — more than 93 percent of married Catholic women report using contraceptives
.. What would be the payoff if you can get to 120 million women?
You’d start to break the cycle of poverty. Women in the United States, when we were finally able to really use contraceptives, look what it did to women going into the work force. All over Africa, young girls getting pregnant early when they don’t want to keeps them out of school. So you’d keep more girls in school, and then you’d have educated girls who would go into the work force.
And we know that when a girl or woman has economic means in her own hands, it shifts the whole power dynamic in the family, whether it’s with her mother-in-law or her husband. It’s the beginning thing that unlocks a woman’s potential.