Measuring unintended pregnancy
Reducing unintended pregnancies is an ultimate aim for family planning programmes. However, measurement of unintended pregnancies is complicated because many are terminated but these abortions are considerably underreported in surveys. On the valid assumption that the majority of induced abortions are unintended, unintended pregnancy is estimated by combining survey data on unintended births with indirect estimates of abortion incidence that are estimated for all sub-regions and for many countries (Cleland in press).
Unintended pregnancy refers to pregnancy that is not wanted at all (unwanted) or was mistimed. Preference at the time of conception is difficult to measure because most studies ask childbearing preferences before or after the conception.
At population level, the composition of unintended pregnancy, that is, proportions of unwanted and mistimed, is dependent on how many women or couples want no more child and want to wait the next pregnancy. Figure 19 presents proportions of currently married fecund women who want no more child and want to wait for 2 or more years in selected countries.
Figure 19: Proportion of currently married fecund women who want no more children and want to wait for 2 or more years
Source: DHS STATCompiler
What can you tell from the figure? Select the missing words from the pull-down menu below.
1. The total proportions of women who don’t want to have a child within 2 years ranges from to among the countries except Colombia, but the composition varies significantly. Whereas 1/3 and 2/5 of women who wanted to wait or stop chilbearing in Tanzania and Zimbabwe respectively want to wait at least for 2 years, % of those wanted to stop childbearing entirely in India.
2. This implies that though it depends on contraceptive prevalence and effectiveness, there may be more births than births in the two African countries and the majority of unintended births in India is likely to be . In addition, demand for long-acting contraceptive methods is high in India. Generally, the majority of women in many sub-Saharan African countries don’t want to cease childbearing and want to space births, though the change towards family limitation have been observed in some countries, like in Kenya in Figure 19.
The next section introduces three widely used methods of estimating unintended births and global and regional prevalence and incidence of unintended pregnancies.