Inside the Gap, birth control is much harder to find

The gist from NYT's Nicholas Kristof (via WPR's Media Roundup) as he crosses central Africa, a place I'll be visiting soon enough:

Here in Kinshasa, we met Emilie Lunda, 25, who had nearly died during childbirth a few days earlier. Doctors saved her life, but her baby died. And she is still recuperating in a hospital and doesn’t know how she will pay the bill.

“I didn’t want to get pregnant,” Emilie told us here in the Congolese capital. “I was afraid of getting pregnant.” But she had never heard of birth control.

In rural parts of Congo Republic, the other Congo to the north, we found that even when people had heard of contraception, they often regarded it as unaffordable.

Most appalling, all the clinics and hospitals we visited in Congo Republic said that they would sell contraceptives only to women who brought their husbands in with them to prove that the husband accepted birth control.

Condoms are somewhat easier to obtain, but many men resist them. More broadly, many men seem to feel that more children are a proud sign of more virility.

So the pill, 50 years old this month in the United States, has yet to reach parts of Africa. And condoms and other forms of birth control and AIDS prevention are still far too difficult to obtain in some areas.

Corollary to reality that abortions are far harder to receive inside the Gap--and often illegal:  it's much harder for women to get birth control inside the Gap, as a rule.

Speaking of which, a map:

Legend comes from an anti-abortion site, so the purplish prose is likely overstated, but it's the most detailed map I could find of any decent size.:

Green: Abortion never legal, or legal only when necessary to save the life of the mother or protect her physical health

Yellow: Abortion legal in "hard cases", such as rape, incest, and/or deformed child.

Red: Abortion legal for social reasons (e.g. mother says she can't afford a child), or to protect the mother's "mental health" (definitions and requirements vary).

Purple: Abortion legal at any time during pregnancy for any reason.

Where the Core-Gap map fails:  highly Catholic LATAM.  Otherwise it matches up quite nicely, suggesting that women's reproductive rights and economic development go hand-in-hand.