State of World Population 2012 - Country Page List - UNFPA

Social Affairs, 2009). Data from 15 industrialized
countries between 2006 and 2008 suggest the
average duration of marriage ranges from 10 to
17 years. Additionally, approximately one in four
registered marriages in countries belonging to the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development is a remarriage.
Adults are entering, staying, and ending
partnerships very differently from previous
generations, and their needs for family
planning education and services have taken
on new characteristics. Family planning policies
and programmes have an opportunity to
rethink their focus so as not to exclude unmarried
people, whether they are never-married,
divorced, separated—temporarily or permanently—or
widowed.
In both developed and developing countries,
social norms—to varying degrees—promote
abstaining from sexual activity until marriage.
Despite broader support for comprehensive
sex education in many settings, the abstinenceuntil-marriage
approach to family planning can
compromise the effectiveness of in-school sexuality
education programmes and neglects the sexual
health needs of single, sexually active adolescents
and young adults. Evidence shows that the
abstinence-only-until-marriage style of sexuality
education is not effective (Kirby, 2008).
“Family planning” usually focuses on the
needs of younger married persons, generally the
most fertile. Yet a growing number of older
women and men have to negotiate contraceptive
use and protect themselves from sexually transmitted
infections later in life, often after marriage
(Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development, 2010). The desire for sexual
relationships among older people (over age 49)
is largely overlooked in policy and programme
design. This omission compromises the rights
of sexually active elders who wish to protect
themselves from harmful sexual and reproductive
health outcomes, including higher-risk unintended
pregnancies and protection from sexually
transmitted infections, including HIV. Meeting
their family planning needs requires challenging
the pervasive assumption that older people are
not sexually active and do not need to exercise
the right to family planning.
Greater numbers of older women and men
are entering their late reproductive years as
single, divorced, or widowed, creating a large
population of people who are “post-marriage.”
Research in Thailand has described the vulnerability
of older men to HIV (Van Landingham
and Knodel, 2007), but family planning research
has not touched on this area. The sexual health
needs of older women and men are often
neglected because, like adolescence, sex outside
marriage for pleasure and intimacy challenges
social norms about who should have sex and
t
Contraceptives at
the Egyptian Family
Planning Association in
Abo Attwa town, near
Ismailiyah.
©UNFPA/Matthew Cassel
THE STATE OF WORLD POPULATION 2012
53