Assesment of the relationship between empowerment and reproductive behavior

 Background and Objective: The1994
International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) specifically
identified “empowering women” as an essential ingredient for achieving
desirable reproductive health and population outcomes. This study was done to
determine the relation between women empowerment and reproductive behaviors. Materials and Methods: An analytical descriptive survey was
carried out for 629 married women aged 15-50 in western
Tehran health centers. Data gathering was through the questionnaires of
demographic, sexual, reproductive history and socio-economical information.
Randomized sampling was done by interview. Data was analyzed in spss16.
Descriptive statistics was used to describe the samples and X2 test
for determination of relation between qualitative variables. Logistic
regression analysis was used for assessing the power of independent variables
that had a significant effect on reproductive behavior. Results: Findings showed that 29.6% of cases were in good
level of reproductive behavior and 20.8% of them were in high level of
empowerment. Overall, women empowerment and reproductive behavior were in the
mid-level, but an improvement was seen in the reproductive behavior with
improvement of the women empowerment. There was also a significant relationship
between reproductive behavior and women age (p=0.01), literacy (p=0.002),
empowerment (p=0.007) and a negative significant relationship with the number
of children (p=0.002) and marital duration (p=0.001). There was no significant
relationship between empowerment and reproductive behavior in logestic
regression because of correlation between variables such as age and education
that inserted in logestic regression simultaneously. Conclusion: Reproductive behavior was considerably affected
by education and socio-economical factors that are determinant factors of
empowerment, hence great attention to women empowerment issue is necessary for
improvement of human development indices and reproductive behaviors.