“When They Force a Woman, It’s to save Her Life”: Community Perceptions of Contraceptive Coercion in an Anonymized Sub-Saharan African Country

Leigh G. Senderowicz, University of Wisconsin at Madison

In recent years, the silence around coercion in family planning research has begun to break, but we still know very little about how contraceptive coercion manifests or how communities make sense of coercion coming from health providers. Here, we use data from 17 focus group discussions and a reproductive justice lens to understand how women respond to the pressure their communities feel to adopt a contraceptive method. Results show broad acceptance of provider coercion in cases where a woman is not perceived to be able to properly care for children, and in cases of high parity or closely spaced births. Acceptance of coercion appears closely linked with belief that providers are acting in the best interest of the mother and her children. We find that the discourse around birth spacing in particular seems to have been weaponized as a way to control women’s reproduction and justify contraceptive coercion.