<mark>of marriage matches and reduce the likelihood of divorce, increase women’s decision-making power in the household, reduce their chances of experiencing domestic violence, and improve health care practices among pregnant women (Goldin and Katz 2002; Jensen and Thornton 2003; Field and Ambrus 2008).</mark> Although low- and middle-income countries have increasingly recognized adolescent fertility as a major concern, sexual and reproductive health education is not universally available, and contraceptive use in these countries is low, despite evidence that access to contraception is key in reducing adolescent fertility (NASEM 2021). A multitude of barriers (such as supply-side problems that affect availability of products and high-quality services, misinformation, worries about side effects, opposition of partners, religious beliefs, etc.) to the uptake of modern contraceptives exist for women in LMICs but these are magnified for adolescents, who lack the autonomy and financial resources to make their own decisions, and often face provider bias. A legal framework for the reproductive rights of adolescents is often lacking in many settings, causing health care providers to be risk averse against backlash from parents, male partners, religious leaders, and/or law enforcement. The socially, culturally, and oftentimes even politically sensitive nature of interventions to increase the uptake of family planning services among adolescent females and young women, especially unmarried or nulliparous women, implies that many policy makers avoid designing interventions and programs that go beyond the provision of basic information to adolescents – often through girls’ clubs, mothers’ groups, or classroom-based sessions. While disinhibition towards risky behaviors is often the cited or implicit reasoning behind reluctance, there is no evidence that SRH education programs targeted to adolescents cause such unintended consequences (Grunseit et al. 1997).

Gage et al. (2020) study the MOMENTUM program in Kinshasa, DRC, which utilizes nursing students to make prenatal and postnatal home visits to first-time mothers aged 15-24, delivering community-based and integrated family planning, maternal, and newborn health services (information and referrals), along with providing support groups for them and their male partners. They find similar increases in the use of modern contraceptives in program areas at two, six, and 12 months postpartum among teenagers (15-19) and adults (20-24) but baseline imbalance between the matched treatment and control groups means that the reported impacts may be overestimated.

Athey et al. (2021) study the effect of a tablet-based job-support tool that they developed for nurse counselors to help them provide FP counseling to women. The tool guides the provider and the client through a structured discussion, which elicits the client’s past experiences with contraception, their fertility goals, preferences towards side effects, desires to exclude or favor specific modern methods, and their medical eligibility – i.e., the elements necessary to make an informed choice for a contraceptive method to adopt. The authors conduct an experiment within this platform after the elicitation of these data, by randomly assigning some clients to the _status quo_ counseling method, which asks the client which method they would like to discuss first vs. an alternative counseling approach ( _ranked recommendation_ ), in which the nurse counselor suggests to the client to start by discussing the method that is deemed most <mark>In these settings, it will be integral to complement safe and legal abortion policies with policies that aim to improve gender-related norms and increase investment opportunities in girls.</mark> 44