Prevalence, reasons, and attitude towards abortion among Iranian married women of reproductive age in Qazvin province

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Alijanzadeh, M, Yazdi, N, Alamshahi, M, Griffiths, MD ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8880-6524 and Alimoradi, Z, 2024. Prevalence, reasons, and attitude towards abortion among Iranian married women of reproductive age in Qazvin province. Discover Public Health, 21: 155. ISSN 3005-0774

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12982-024-00293-9

Abstract

Background and aims: Abortion influences the composition and size of population. Estimating the overall and type-specific abortion rates, the reasons to choose the abortion can be helpful in designing and implementing preventive intervention. Therefore, the present study was designed to determine the: (i) prevalence of abortion, (ii) attitude of married women of reproductive age towards abortion, and (iii) reasons for choosing abortion by married women of reproductive age in Qazvin province.

Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted between February and April 2023, and comprised married women of reproductive age (N = 1571) referred to urban and rural comprehensive health centers in five cities of Qazvin province. Utilizing multi-stage proportional sampling process, data for the survey (including demographic and fertility information, reasons for choosing abortion, and attitudes toward abortion) were collected online.

Results: The lifetime prevalence of abortion was 18.6% (among the total sample). The past-year prevalence was 22.3% (among those who reported having had an abortion). Of those reporting having had an abortion, 73.6% reported it was their first one, and 65.1% reported it was non-spontaneous . Women’s reasons for choosing abortion fell into one of three main clusters: (i) couple’s behavior, health and relationship problems, (ii) fertility-related stressful experiences, and (iii) family economic situations. The main reported reason to choose abortion was a couple’s behavior (e.g., drug use), health (e.g., physical disease, psychological problems), and relationship problems (e.g., sexual infidelity, divorce) explaining 27% of the variance. Also, pro-abortion attitude was the most important attitude towards non-spontaneous abortion explaining 26.33% of variance. The variables that increased the likelihood of non-spontaneous abortion included choosing a reason for abortion vs. having no reason (OR = 1.77, p = 0.05), having poor vs. good mental health (OR = 1.74, p = 0.03), having a pro-abortion attitude (OR = 1.09, p = 0.09), and having ≥ 3 children vs. having no children (OR = 0.53, p = 0.06).

Conclusion: Women in high-risk groups for non-spontaneous abortion (i.e., those aged over 35 years, those married for more than five years, those with an infertility history, those with a lower number of children, those living in rural areas, and those having poor mental health status) should be assessed by primary healthcare services during preconception and have early prenatal counseling to help in decisions regarding abortion.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Discover Public Health
Creators:	Alijanzadeh, M., Yazdi, N., Alamshahi, M., Griffiths, M.D. and Alimoradi, Z.
Publisher:	Springer
Date:	25 October 2024
Volume:	21
ISSN:	3005-0774
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1186/s12982-024-00293-9 DOI 2265740 Other
Rights:	© the author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Jonathan Gallacher
Date Added:	28 Oct 2024 11:35
Last Modified:	28 Oct 2024 11:35
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/52474