بررسی ارتباط توانمندی زنان با رفتارهای باروری

 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.