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Undergraduate Economic Review

Abstract

Increasing access to contraception has the potential to empower women and improve the economic standing of families across the globe. Many researchers have explored the impacts of contraception on families and the determinants of women’s level of empowerment, but little scholarship exists on their direct relationship. This paper explores the impacts of contraceptive use on women’s empowerment, measured by a sum of women’s household decision-making agency. Panel data from three rounds of the Indonesian Family Life Survey is used to run multiple regressions with household fixed effects. Results suggest that women who use contraception have input on two additional types of household decisions, compared to women who do not use contraception. Therefore, women who use contraception have greater decision-making agency. Though additional research is necessary to prove causation and further understand this relationship, these preliminary findings support that use of contraception increases women's decision-making agency in their households.

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