Contraception, unintended pregnancy and induced abortion

The research work shows the characteristics of the practice of underground pharmacological abortion. The use of medicines that contain misoprostol has become popular in Argentina for the voluntary interruption of pregnancy in a context where abortion is only legal in some circumstances.

We enquired about the representations and practices of women using misoprostol in the city of Cordoba, Argentina, as well as the first level doctors in the health public sector.

The methodology consisted in questionnaires and in-depth interviews in order to know the characteristics of pharmacological abortion carried out by women autonomously and reported by themselves. Concurrently, we interviewed professional doctors on their practices about their using misoprostol in public health institutions.
Preliminary results show that women consider the method beneficial mainly because they gain autonomy and because it presents little risk of them being charged with a crime. Most doctors do not prescribe the drug in the fear that they are accused and due to religious and/or moral conditionings. More advanced results will show that a restrictive law does not stop the number of abortions but it stigmatizes women and health professionals.

For more last 2000 years Christian churches have been against artificial birth control. However, their attitudes towards artificial birth control began to change in the 19th century as theologians became more willing to accept that morality should come from the conscience of each individual rather than from outside teachings where the Anglicans were the first church to issue a statement in favour of contraception, which they did at the Lambeth Conference in 1930. Influenced by this Protestants Christian followed in the 1931. Protestant denominations permit artificial birth control to some extent. The Roman Catholic Church only allows 'natural' birth control, by which it means only having sex during the infertile period of a woman's monthly cycle. Artificial methods of contraception are banned. In this context, an attempt has been made to study the Indian women contraceptive use by different methods which were analyzed from the NFHS-3 survey. Uni-variate, bi-variate and multi-variate analyses were done to see the percentage use of each type of methods, and by various back ground characteristics of unmet need and have examined the best predictors for non-use of contraceptives. Awareness of contraception in this study is 95.5 percent. The current prevalence rate of contraceptive use was 40.7% and total unmet need was 12.6 percent.

Background:Without accurate measurement we cannot effectively target programs to reduce the dangerous consequences of unsafe abortion.Here we undertook a multiple-bias analysis approach to quantify the effect of systematic error on abortion-related maternal mortality estimates and outline a simple framework for investigators interested in replicating a multiple-bias analysis in their own data. Methods: This analysis employed Monte-Carlo based, probabilistic, multiple bias-analysis techniques to evaluate the influence of selection bias and misclassification in three studies of abortion related mortality. The prior distributions chosen for selection bias and misclassification differed by study, but a common analysis plan was followed.Results:For each study, the proportion of abortion related deaths (median) increased significantly after multiple bias analysis.Conclusions:These findings have broad reaching implications for the way we understand the distribution of cause of maternal death.If, as our data suggest, abortion related deaths account for a larger proportion of maternal deaths than previously thought, these methods can be used to more accurately determine the range of potential burden of abortion related mortality, and can also be used to help target funds towards increasing access to family planning and safe abortion.

Unintended pregnancy is an important demographic measure used to justify and assess the success of family planning programs. There are three commonly used techniques to measure unwanted and mistimed pregnancies, all of which rely on the simplifying assumption that fertility preferences are relatively stable. Accumulated research from a variety of contexts, however, indicates that key measures of fertility preference, including ideal family size, the desire for another child, and the desired timing of next pregnancy, change frequently over time, particularly as women’s life circumstances evolve. This paper uses seven waves of panel data, each spaced four months apart, from young women in southern Malawi to examine the prevalence of change in fertility preferences and the implications for measures of unwanted and mistimed pregnancy. Specifically, we estimate the prevalence of unwanted and unintended pregnancy using seven different measures, three of which allow for preferences to change over time. The paper concludes with a discussion of the differences in estimates and the possible implications for measures of unintendedness in other contexts.