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Abstract: This study aims at investigating the determinants of unwanted births in Bangladesh and examines the dominance of each of these determinants over others. This study based 2011 BDHS data from which 5,493 ever married women were finally selected as the unit of analysis. Logistic regression analysis has been applied to underscore the determinants and to examine the control effects of variables. Result shows that about 17 percent women reported their last birth was unwanted and 83 percent of them married before reaching age 18. Unmet need for family planning, marriage at younger age , religion, low schooling years of women, and husband's desire for more children emerged as dominant factors despite control effects in the process and these factors influenced to have far higher unwanted births than their respective counterparts. The most striking finding of this study is that, along with the unmet need for family planning, there are few other factors that also supersede sex preferences. Influence of child loss experience on having unwanted birth has appeared to be insignificant. Along with the quality and pervasive family planning services, delivery of negotiation assistance to the service seekers, through the existing family planning service setup, to convince their spouses would produce great result.
Keywords: unwanted fertility, total fertility rate, replacement level fertility, unmet need, sex preference
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1. Introduction
Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated (964 inhabitants per square kilometer) countries in the world and the population of the country followed an exponential growth trend (PHC 2011) in twentieth century. Bangladesh's current health sector program, the Health, Population and Nutrition Sector Development Program (HPNSDP) 2011-2016 aims to reduce fertility to 2 births per woman by 2016 to shed the overwhelmingly contiguous population. To shape the fertility to align with the target, it is very important to identify the instrumental factors that might delay the attainment of the fertility target, so that necessary measures can be taken to control those factors. One of the mainstays that are standing in the way of achieving the fertility target is unwanted fertility. The excess of fertility over ideal family size reported by the respondents is regarded as unwanted fertility (BDHS 2011), which is being used as one of the indicators of...