 Power to choose? Examining the link between contraceptive use decision and domestic violenceManini Ojha and Karan Babbar Economics & Human Biology, 2024, vol. 55, issue C Abstract: Contraception is a crucial tool that empowers women to control their bodily autonomy. Concurrently, domestic violence remains a pressing public health issue, depleting women’s autonomy. We establish a causal link between a woman’s contraceptive use decision and the occurrence of intimate partner violence. We use an instrumental variable approach to estimate our causal effects by utilizing nationally representative data for India. Using exogenous variation in the neighbourhood average of women’s exposure to family planning messages via radio, we find that if a woman independently makes the decision to use contraceptives, she is at a significantly higher risk of physical, sexual and emotional domestic violence. We estimate the bounds of our effects by assuming the IV to be plausibly exogenous, where we relax the exogeneity condition. Our findings underscore the importance of reproductive health in initiatives that reduce domestic violence and targeted policies that provide support to younger and employed women and those from backward caste and rural areas. Keywords: Contraception; Intimate partner violence; Radio; Family planning; NFHS-5; India (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ehbiol:v:55:y:2024:i:c:s1570677x24000686 DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2024.101416 Access Statistics for this article Economics & Human Biology is currently edited by J. Komlos, Inas R Kelly and Joerg Baten More articles in Economics & Human Biology from Elsevier |
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