WORLD JOURNAL OF ADVANCE
HEALTHCARE RESEARCH

Indrani Malwenna*

ABSTRACT

Unmet need for family planning refers to the percentage of all fecund women who are married or living in union and thus presumed to be sexually active but are not using any method of contraception, either do not want to have any more children or want to postpone their next birth at least for next two years or do not know when or if they want another child. Use of appropriate contraceptive method helps the user to avoid unplanned pregnancies, thus reducing the risk of induced abortion; the number one killer of women in the reproductive age in developing countries. Due to its clandestine nature, most abortions in the developing world are unsafe, thus resulting a series of complications, the most disastrous being a maternal death. Even though abortion is criminalized in Sri Lanka except to save the mother?s life, average of 700 abortions are carried out daily, which accounts for 75% of live births per day being the second leading cause of maternal deaths in 2006, 2008 and 2010 It has been estimated in Sri Lanka Demographic and Health Survey 2006/07 that 17.2% of births in the previous 5 years were unplanned or unwanted. It has been revealed that, 73% among 365 abortion seekers were found to have unmet need for family planning. Economic burden of induced abortion is unbeareble, because the total cost for management of complications of an abortion has been estimated to be 462 US $, of which 79% is spent by government health expenditure in Sri Lanka.

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