Post-abortion contraceptive behaviour among currently married women in India

Background: Abortion has been practised in one form or another from the beginning of human society, but when a women presents for an abortion as result of an unintended pregnancy, mush of the counselling involves the abortion procedure itself. However, in order to help women avoid future unintended pregnancies following an abortion, options for post abortion contraceptive needs to be addressed. Women undergoing an abortion are at risk of another unintended pregnancy and induced abortion. According to official statistics the induced abortion in world is approximately 40-50 million which take place annually (Henshaw et al., 1999). Of the total induced abortions, a large share takes place in the developing countries using unsafe methods (Mundigo 1991; WHO 2003). In India Medical termination of pregnancy (MTP) act allows termination of pregnancy; but it is hardly performed in contemporary in India; thus almost all the induced abortions that take in the country are technically illegal. However, it was estimates India accounts for 6.4 million induced abortion and approximately 4 million spontaneous abortions each year, most performed in unsafe conditions and often without any contraceptive counselling or services (Duggal et al., 2004, Baherjee et al., 2012, Banerjee et al., 2010).

Objective: The aim of this study is to examine the Post-abortion contraceptive behaviour among currently married women in India Data: Data were mainly retrieved from India’s Fourth National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4), conducted during 2015-16 (International Institute for population sciences {IIPS} & ORC Macro, 2000). NFHS-4 collected demographic, socioeconomic, and health information from a nationally representative probability sample of 6, 99,686 women aged 15-49 years residing in 7, 23,875 households. Multistage cluster random sample were use to collect the data. For the present study we use currently married women with the sample size is 4, 99,627 Whereas, Bi-variate analysis is carried out in this study. Result: This study identifies Pill, IUD, and Condom is the method which highly used among currently married women after abortion. The used of contraction is high among women age group 25-34, full exposure of mass media, and 3+ children and also with increasing the wealth index and education the use of contraction also increases. Method failure (30.7 percent), desire to become pregnant (23.3 percent), side effects or health concerns (17.1 percent) are the reason for not using the contraceptive method. Whereas 36.2 percent are women indentation to use contractive in next 12 months, 21.7 percent women will use in future and 42.1 percent women not decided. However, out those women use the contraction, 40.6 percent will use the modern method and 47.9 percent has not decried yet.

Conclusion knowledge contribution: The present study has shown the post-abortion contraception among currently married women and also when they will use and what method. It was found that after abortion women mostly use Pill, IUD. However, ever it was found that 57.9 percent women want to use contraception but out of these women only 40.6 percent women use the modern method and 11.6 percent women use the traditional method. Post-abortion contraception is still being treated as part of family planning services rather than as a component of maternal health. This perspective ignores the potential risk of maternal mortality and morbidity associated with short pregnancy interval and results in a missed opportunity for intervention. It is essential to strengthen the family planning component of comprehensive abortion care services in order to prevent unintended pregnancy. This study reveals that still there is a need to focus on the unmet need for the modern method of contraception in India. The government should increase the methods availability, train providers on newly introduced methods, integrate evidence-based guidelines into contraceptive recommendations, and educate women and their communities about the safety and efficacy of new contraceptive methods

Author(s): Nutan Kumari

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