Rethinking Global Family Planning Measurement: Bringing in a Rights-, Justice-, and Person-Centered Lens

IUSSP at the “Lundis de l’INED” – 16 March 2026 

IUSSP Scientific Panel co-chairs Ilene Speizer (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Beth Sully (Guttmacher Institute), of the IUSSP Panel on Rethinking Family Planning Measurement Using a Reproductive Justice and Rights Lens, presented the Panel’s work at INED on the Condorcet Campus in Aubervilliers, France, as part of IUSSP’s annual session in the Lundi de l’INED lecture series. Heini Väisänen (INED) served as discussant. The presentations were delivered in English, with simultaneous interpretation in French for participants joining online worldwide. The session provided an overview of the Panel’s three-year programme and recent advances in family planning measurement.


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Supported by a 2023 grant from the Gates Foundation, the Panel’s mandate is to examine how to better measure the need for and use of family planning. The Panel’s work draws on the frameworks of reproductive rights, reproductive justice, and person-centered measurement. They presented the findings from a global consensus-building process and a recommendations workshop held in November 2025.

The presentation highlighted the need to move beyond traditional indicators focused on contraceptive prevalence, unmet need, and demand satisfied, toward approaches that incorporate human rights, justice, and person-centered perspectives to better capture individual preferences, autonomy, and rights.

Current frameworks, including SDG indicator 3.7.1, rely on “demand satisfied,” based on contraceptive use among women classified as in need. These measures have been widely critiqued for relying on assumptions about sexual activity, fertility desires, and marital status, and for conflating the desire to avoid pregnancy with the desire to use contraception.

While unmet need was considered to be a breakthrough for measuring women’s fertility desires in the 1990s, it still falls short of capturing individuals’ preferences and autonomy. A growing move toward person-centered measurement seeks to better align indicators with reproductive rights and justice by focusing on self-reported contraceptive preferences and experiences.

The discussion highlighted strong momentum and key challenges in developing and implementing new indicators. The speakers discussed emerging measures such as preference-aligned fertility management (PFM) and contraceptive concordance to identify individuals who are satisfied or dissatisfied with their current contraceptive situation. Early applications in India, Uganda, and Nigeria demonstrate both feasibility and growing interest.

Looking ahead, the Panel recommended that while “unmet need” should continue to be collected for trend analysis, it should no longer be interpreted as a direct measure of contraceptive demand. 

The longer-term goal is to refine and implement alignment-based indicators. This will require further work on survey design, including question wording and sequencing, as well as how to incorporate method-specific preferences and satisfaction. Ensuring applicability across diverse populations—including marginalized groups—and clear communication to different audiences will also be critical.

Overall, the discussion underscored a broader shift toward measuring what people actually want and are able to achieve, placing individual agency at the center of demographic measurement. The Panel will publish its recommendations soon and has already contributed a special issue in Studies in Family Planning based on an expert meeting undertaken in March, 2024.

• Slides
• English and French transcripts will be prepared in the coming weeks.