Christians Women Contraceptive Use in India: A Preview from National Family Health Survey-3

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.