PERCEPTIONS, ATTITUDES AND PRACTICES ABOUT REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AMONG YOUNG FEMALES IN FAISALABAD DISTRICT, PAKISTAN

Reproductive health is concerned with the people's ability to have a satisfying and safe sex life ensuring their capability to reproduce with a liberty of making a decision that if, when and how often they have to do so. In Pakistan, culturally females are married at a young age; become mothers and are at risk of health complications i.e. HIV/ STD and STI. There is less utilization of reproductive health services throughout Pakistan that ultimately affect the health status of people at very young age. Most of the communities are not aware of reproductive health services and thus do not avail of these facilities. So the present study was designed to examine the females perceptions, attitudes and practices about reproductive health services as well as to determine the level of their empowerment to take decisions and make choices regarding their own reproductive health besides determining the level of the quality, availability and accessibility of reproductive health services and to suggest some measures for policy makers to improve the reproductive health state of young mothers in district Faisalabad. A sample of 600 young married females aged 15-32 years were selected through multistage sampling technique. Most (44.0%) of the respondents belonged to age category of 26-30 years; 35.5% were married up to 18 years; 39.3% had passed up to 5 years marriage duration; 71.8% had primary and above level of education. Majority (65.9%) had up to Rs.10,000 per month income, 49.2% possessed 6-10 family members, 73.5% bore at least 2 and above live children, 74.0 % perceived family planning as good,79.7% had knowledge of FP, 54.7% HIV/AIDs, STIs (30.2%), RH (68.7%), RTIs (47.7%) and 26.0% practiced FPM. The most common FPMs were condom (33.3%) and tubectomy (21.8%) while 41.0% faced side effect because of FPM during their reproductive life. A huge majority (79.8%) of the respondents received ANC, 87.8% made regular visits for medical checkup and 48.8% got ANC from Pvt. Hospital during last pregnancy. Bi-variate analysis showed highly significant relation among age at marriage, awareness level, monthly income, education, number of pregnancies, number of children, number of visits to medical centre, availability of RH services, cultural hindrance and age of respondents vs. their reproductive health. The adjusted value of R2 was 0.415 which indicates that the predictor variables given in the model were responsible for 41.5% variation in the reproductive health of females