The billionaire philanthropist Melinda Gates, a practising Catholic, has thrown down the gauntlet to the Vatican and vowed to dedicate the rest of her life to improving access to contraception across the globe.

Gates, who with her husband, Bill, the founder of Microsoft, is one of the world's biggest players on development issues, predicted that women in Africa and Asia would soon be "voting with their feet", as women in the west have done, and would ignore the church's ban on artificial birth control.

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