Understanding of Contraceptive Adoption in India: Does Women's Autonomy Matter?

Ruchi Sogarwal, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)

Available evidence has established the fact that woman’s autonomy is likely to have a significant impact on demographic and health seeking behavior of couples by altering women’s relative control over fertility and contraceptive use. Women’s participation in decisions related to intra-household affairs was positively associated with contraceptive use. For the study, an attempt has been made to examine the relative importance of physical, decision-making, and economic autonomy on the adoption of contraception with the help of multilevel model. Data has been extracted from NFHS-2 of 90,303 ever-married women in India. Analysis clearly revealed that the average physical autonomy in the community is positively related to use of contraceptives. At the individual level, such an effect is seen for decision-making autonomy. Woman’s own physical autonomy has a strong impact on adoption of use of contraceptive. Economic autonomy is not positively related to adoption of contraceptive use at any level.