Reproductive health profile of married women: experience from a rural community of Bangladesh

Design: The study was a community based cross sectional study . Objective: The study was conducted to find out the reproductive health profile of rural married women of a selected rural community in Dhamrai Upazila of Dhaka district. Materials and Methods: The reproductive age included considering specific selection criteria. Data were collected by face-to-face inter- view using lyzed by using SPSS software. Results: The study revealed that majority of the women were either illiter- ate (34.1%) house wives and major segment (52.9%) had poor monthly family income (Tk.5000-10000). Among all, 63.7% were married within 11-17 years of age and 69.8% gave birth of first child during adolescence (16- 18 years). Major part (60.29%) of the women didn t use any contraceptive and only 38.55% utilized ante- natal care. Average number of children was 2.73+1.52 and most of the delivery (81.6%) was conducted at home by untrained birth attendants (57.0%). Adverse pregnancy outcome included abortion, menstruation regulation, still birth, complications to new born and mothers. Reproductive health problems faced by the women included menstrual problem, physical assault, leucorrhea, mental torment, sexual annoyance, puer- peral infection, pregnancy related complications, urinary tract infection pelvic inflammatory disease. Most (81.43%) of the illiterate women didn t utilize ante-natal care while majority (60.0%) having higher secondary school certificate (HSC) had =3 ante-natal visits and this variation was statistically significant [?2(12)=26.35, p 0.05]. Majority (71.21%) of the illiterate women didn t use any contraceptive method while most of them having HSC used either condom or oral contraceptive and this discrepancy was statis- tically significant [?2(12)=27.86, p 0.05]. Majority (67.1%) of the illiterate women were delivered by untrained birth and traditional birth attendant (40.0%), this dif ference was statistically significant [?2(12)=24.57, p 0.05]. Conclusion: Reproductive health profile was worse among the illiterate, less aware and low income rural women. The study recommends formulation and implementation of ef fective strategies to improve repro- ductive health status of the rural women.