Pregnancies, Abortion and Women's Health in Rural Haryana, India

Community Medicine & Health Education

Agrawal and Unisa, J Community Med Health Educ 2013, 3:3 http://dx.doi.org/10.4172/2161-0711.1000207

Research Article

Open Access

Pregnancies, Abortion and Women’s Health in Rural Haryana, India Sutapa Agrawal1* and Sayeed Unisa2 1 2

South Asia Network for Chronic Disease, Public Health Foundation of India, New Delhi, India Department of Mathematical Demography and Statistics, International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai, India

Abstract In this study women’s perceived health status and self-reported health problems has been examined according to the number of pregnancies, gestational stage of abortion, and number of abortions among the rural women of Haryana, India by analyzing data from an in-depth interview of 329 ever-married women conducted in five villages of Haryana state of India during the year 2003. From our study, it emerged that women who had undergone an abortion were 1.7 times (OR: 1.68; 95% CI: 0.95-2.98; p=0.076) more likely to perceive their health status as worse with reference to women who had not experienced any abortion. Self-reported health problems such as pain in lower abdomen and body weakness were found to be significantly (p