Safe motherhood in South Asia: current status and strategies for change

Abstract

Women in South Asia comprise close to one third of the world's female population. Not only is South Asia an extremely populous region but population growth rates have been much higher than averages for other developing countries. The stable and high levels of fertility along with falling mortality have led to a youthful population structure. Clearly there is a gap between family planning supply and demand in this region and one of the major constraints are the taboos against the use of family planning methods as anti-religion, anti customary, anti-societal and "unnatural'. An integrated approach fully capitalising on convincing families of the advantages of saving a mother's life and improving her health or the health and welfare of her children and the direct advantages in terms of health and life chances of children, may be an important and critical argument fo the greater utilisation of both family planning. There is a comment by S. Samad on pp 1138-1140. -from Authors