Sexual health goes back 30 years in Latin America due to pandemic

the services of sexual health and reproductive in Latin America and the caribbean They went back some 30 years due to the coronavirus pandemic, the regional director of the United Nations Population Fund (Unfpa), the Costa Rican Harold Robinson, said in an interview with Efe.

Robinson gave as an example the access of women to contraceptives, whose decline was located in 2021 “more or less” at the levels of 1990, which is “outrageous”, he pointed out.

“If you apply that to all areas, that’s a setback of more or less 30 years,” he said in the interview.

The situation was due to the fact that many countries limited these services in the midst of the pandemic, while organizations that work for women’s rights were forced to move resources to other areas of health.

Because of this, sexual and reproductive health services had a “very strong” impact, Robinson acknowledged.

This contributed to an increase in unwanted pregnancies, thousands of them early.

According to data provided by Unfpa, last year almost 12 million women in 115 countries lost access to family planning services, which caused 1.4 million unplanned pregnancies.

In these countries, according to the data, women faced an average interruption of family planning services of around 3.6 months in the last year.

The pandemic, Robinson pointed out, did nothing but accentuate inequality in the region, especially among the most vulnerable.

Latin America, the most unequal region on the planet, he pointed out, “is the one that suffers the most, has the highest lethality, where the most people die” due to Covid-19.

“The pandemic uses fuel for people who are much more vulnerable,” added Robinson, who is visiting the Dominican Republic for the Dialogue of Drums, an event on Afro-descendants in the country.

Another effect of the pandemic was the increase in cases of gender violence.

The first wave of the pandemic produced the so-called “social pandemic of domestic violence” because women were confined with their aggressors, “which makes women more vulnerable,” he said.

According to data provided by the UN last November, one in two women experienced or knew of a case of gender-based violence during the confinement.

“Almost all the dimensions of the pandemic affect the most vulnerable people much more, hence the UN proposal to rebuild again, but better,” the UNFPA regional director continued in the interview.

Robinson Davis also discussed teen pregnancy in Latin America, the region with the second highest number of early pregnancies.

This is a “deeper” issue that requires a comprehensive policy to deal with it, and he gave the example of countries like Uruguay where sex education policies have helped reduce teenage pregnancies.

UN data indicates that in Latin America and the Caribbean there are 62 births per 1,000 adolescent girls between the ages of 15 and 19.