To understand whether and how reproductive technologies contribute to the exercise of reproductive rights, observers must ask who controls the technology, for what purposes, and in what time and place. Even then, assessing the social value of reproductive technologies is not straightforward. Around the world people express a range of views on the topic, from the idea that technology benefits women by broadening contraceptive choice, to the notion that new contraceptives are tools of social control over women. Despite a diversity of opinions on the ethics and appropriateness of specific technologies, there is a growing consensus that women and men have a basic right to control their bodies, reproduction, and sexuality. In many places, however, people have faced barriers as they attempt to exercise these rights.
Some obstacles are primarily economic, while others are physical or institutional in nature.
Choice can be effectively impeded when there is a lack of information provided in counseling or in obtaining consent for research participation, or when information is biased, misleading, or inaccurate. But even when rights are guaranteed by law, people effectively lose them if services do not exist. For example, mergers between secular and Catholic hospitals in the United States have brought the Catholic Church's ideology to bear on the services that the new hospitals offer, resulting in the removal of most reproductive health services from such hospitals. Community activism in some locations, however, has prevented such mergers from taking place or has mediated their effect by forging creative solutions. Perhaps no other reproductive technology more aptly represents the complexity of gate-keepers, barriers, political forces, conflicting interpretations, and opportunity than does medical abortion.