The levels and correlates of unmet need for family planning in the city of Mahabad, Iran: an application of the revised definition of unmet need

The changes in the concept of unmet need for family planning over time have led to inconsistent results across surveys. In a recent attempt, the MEASURE DHS program revised the definition of unmet need. Applying the revised and original definitions, this study measures the unmet needs for family planning in a representative sample of 700 married women, interviewed in the 2012 Mahabad Fertility Survey in Iran. Based on the revised definition, 10.8 percent of women faced an unmet need for family planning, including 7.7 percent for birth spacing and 3.1 percent for birth stopping proposes. The corresponding estimates for the original definition were respectively 9.6, 6.0 and 3.6 percent. Also, about 10 percent of women who used traditional contraceptive methods, largely withdrawal, wished to use modern methods. Taking into account this unmet need for modern methods, we estimate an overall 20.8 percent of unmet needs for family planning in the city of Mahabad based on the revised definition that is 1.3 percent more than the estimate based on the original definition. The observed gap in the original and revised estimates is consistent with the gaps found in the surveys of 70 countries in the literature.