Clinics in Mother and Child Health

Abstract

Family Planning Service Utilization and Its Associated Factors among Married Women in Benchi-Maji Zone, Southwest, Ethiopia: Community-Based Crosssectional Study

Tafesse Lamaro and Niguse Tadele

In Ethiopia, contraceptive use has doubled in the last five years, but women still bears an average of five children and 25% of married women want to space or limit their births but are not currently using contraception. So that, the purpose of this study was to assess Family planning services utilization and its associated factors among married women in Benchi-Maji Zone, Southwest, Ethiopia.

A community based cross sectional study was carried out to collect data from 801 randomly selected married women in the reproductive age group from six Kebles (lowest administrative unit). Pretested and structured questionnaire was used to collect data. The collected data was entered into a computer using Epi-Data version 3.0 then exported to SPSS for Windows version 20.0 for further analysis. Logistic regression was used to identify important predictors of family planning service utilization.

Out of 765 study participants, 82.61% were current users of at least one of Family Planning (FP) method and majority of them were using methods to space birth interval 452 (71.5%), to prevent unwanted pregnancy 198 (31.3%), followed by to promote health of born children 149 (23.6%). Knowledge about the benefits of FP and postnatal care follow up during their last delivery showed statistically significant associations with FP service utilization. Mothers who have mentioned at least one benefit of FP were about seventy times (AOR 71 95 % CI 25-202) more likely to ever use either of the FP methods and who have PNC follow up during their last delivery were about four times more likely (AOR 3.795 % CI 1.6-9.0) to use either of the FP methods in comparison with those mothers who haven’t attended for Postnatal care at all.

Most of the study participants prefer to use short-term family planning methods. It is important to promote longterm family planning methods to get a desire outcome among married women. Women are more receptive of FP during post-natal visits. It is desirable to utilize that visit for promotion of long-term FP methods among married women.