Publications

Abortion is one of the major factors contributing to the high maternal mortality in the lowandmiddle-income countries. The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence ofabortion its determinants among the women of the reproductive age (15-49 years) attendingJRRH, Jinja district. A simple random sampling method was used to select 104 women whohad at least one birth in the last five years. Abortion was measured on the basis of the reasonprovided by the women for having their last abortion. Likewise, unsafe abortion wasmeasured on the basis of provider providing the service to women. Prevalence of abortionand the association of abortion and unsafe abortion with various factors were assessed usingOdds Ratio (OR) with their 95% Confidence Interval (CI) using binary logistic regressionmodels. The prevalence of abortion was found to be 4.8 percent among women with 20percent of them conducted using unsafe methods. Women in the age group 30-34 were morelikely (OR=4.59, 95% CI 1.8311.50) to perform abortions compared to women of the youngestage group (15-19 years). Women having secondary level of education were more likely(OR=2.58, 95% CI 1.62-4.09) to conduct abortions compared to illiterate women. Finally,richest women in urban settings were more likely (OR=2.97, 95% CI 1.71-5.17) to haveabortions compared to women from rural settings. Also from the logistic regression models,women in the age group 30-34 were less likely (OR=0.08, 95% CI 0.01-0.89) to have unsafeabortions compared to the youngest age group (15-19 years) and the women from urbansettings had lesser (OR=0.25, 95% CI 0.07-0.89) likelihood of conducting unsafe abortioncompared to those from rural settings. From our study it was identified that one in everytwenty women of reproductive age attending JRRH abort their child and nearly one in five ofthose are unsafe. Further studies should consider the relationship between the use ofcontraception and abortion to identify if women were aborting due to lack of access tocontraception or due to other reasons