Discrimination in family planning facilities

Access to family planning facilities may be barred or discouraged on the basis of age, marital status, number of children, income or race, or alternatively strongly encouraged on these same grounds. The main areas where discrimination occurs are: access to family planning information; to all or certain kinds of contraceptives; and to abortion.

A specific form of family planning discrimination was the experimental - and failed - programme initiated by the Singapore government in 1984. Under the programme, women with university degrees were encouraged (via priority registration at pre-primary and primary school levels), to bear more children, while women without higher education were granted large sums of money if they agreed to be sterilized after their first or second child.