Assessing potential for induced abortion among Indian women.

There is some evidence that women use induced abortion as a means of contraception as well as for sex selection beyond its justified use in case of undesirable pregnancies or pregnancies with foetal defects. An attempt is made here towards providing an indirect assessment of the magnitude of induced abortion among Indian women given the fact that the direct reporting on this phenomenon in large-scale surveys suffers from gross under-reporting. The assumptions used here are that induced abortion could be used as a means of contraception (i.e. in terms of termination of untimely/unwanted pregnancies) or as a means of attaining the preferred sex composition of children. This aspect is important while looking for evidence to support the hypothesis that the imbalance in child sex ratio is a consequence of sex-selective abortions and reflects the dissonance in the levels of contraception and the declines in fertility. Specifically this paper uses the information on the age-specific unmet need pattern as well as the age schedule of fertility. To compute the deviant reproductive behaviour it uses the distribution of sex composition of children within each children ever born (CEB) category of women of specific ages. All this information is available only for currently married women in National Family Health Survey 1998-99; NFHS-2 and hence they form the sample base of our analysis. We are able to provide separate estimates for use of abortion for sex selection to get both desired sex composition and its use as a contraceptive method to avoid unwanted births. It was found that in India induced abortion due to sex selection is 74 per 1000 live births and that due to contraception is 115 per thousand live births. In total there are 189 induced abortions per 1000 live births. This estimation process also gives an idea of the proportion of abortions that are taking place due to sex selection and the proportion of abortions that occur on purely contraceptive grounds. It can be said that of the total amount of induced abortions that occur 39 per cent of abortions are for sex selection while remaining 61 percent are for avoiding unwanted pregnancies. It is possible that the estimates of abortion being used as a contraceptive could be slightly on the higher side if contraceptive use has been under-reported in surveys. At the over all level the estimates are consistent suggesting high level of use of abortion as a contraceptive method in the country and this has serious implications for health policy in general and womens well being in particular. This has to be addressed at policy level and there is a need to reduce/restrict use of induced abortion as a method of contraception. (authors)