Unplanned pregnancy and risk of abortion among adolescent women in Uttar Pradesh, India

Ruchi Jain, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)
Abhishek Singh, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)

The present study tries to investigate the relationship between unwanted pregnancies and risk of abortions among younger and older women for both rural and urban Uttar Pradesh using National Family Health Survey data. It also examines the covariates of unwanted pregnancy keeping wanted pregnancy as a control group. Out of 9292 ever-married women 3762 women were pregnant, during the three years preceding the survey. Bivariate analysis shows that 88 percent (3306) of women were older and 12 percent (456) were adolescent i.e. in the age group 15-19. Among adolescents 25 percent of pregnancies were unwanted and among them 60 percent had terminated their pregnancy. At the same time, the women whose pregnancy was wanted 20 percent of them have terminated it. There occurs high prevalence of clandestine abortions among adolescent women because of low practice of contraception and high son preference and health complications were reported for one-fourth of women.