Domestic violence, contraceptive use, and unwanted pregnancy in rural India.

This study examines the relationship between male-to-female physical domestic violence and unwanted pregnancy among women in three economically and culturally diverse areas of India. A central methodological focus of the study is the examination of retrospective and prospective measures of pregnancy unwantedness, contrasting their usefulness for specifying levels of unwanted pregnancy and its relationship with domestic violence. Data from India's 1998-99 National Family Health Survey and a 2002-03 follow-up survey for which women in four states were reinterviewed are analyzed, and the factors associated with the intersurvey adoption of contraception and the experience of an unwanted pregnancy are examined. Women who experience physical violence from their husbands are significantly less likely to adopt contraception and more likely to experience an unwanted pregnancy. A prospectively measured indicator of unwanted pregnancy identifies a higher prevalence of unwanted pregnancies than do the traditionally employed retrospective measures and is more successful in establishing a relationship between unwanted pregnancies and domestic violence. The results demonstrate a clear relationship between a woman's experience of physical violence from her husband and her ability to achieve her fertility intentions. The need to improve the measurement of pregnancy intendedness is clear, and a move toward using prospective measures as the standard is necessary.

Consistency and predictive ability of fertility preference indicators: longitudinal evidence from rural India.

CONTEXT: Ideal family size and desire for an additional child are the two most commonly used fertility preference indicators. However, little is known about the consistency over time of responses to each measure, the consistency between the two indicators or the predictive value of these indicators in India. METHOD: Longitudinal data from the 1998-1999 National Family Health Survey and a follow-up survey conducted four years later were analyzed to determine the consistency of responses to the two fertility preference indicators (both over time and between indicators) and to determine whether baseline responses were associated with subsequent fertility, unwanted births and contraceptive use. RESULTS: Responses on the measure of ideal family size were consistent at the two time points for 53% of nonsterilized women. Eighty-two percent of women who explicitly said in 1998 that they did not desire more children responded identically in 2002, although about half of these women had given birth in the intervening period. The indicators were associated with each other: Among women with at least one son, 79% of those who had attained or surpassed their ideal family size said they wanted to stop childbearing, compared with 18% of those who had not. Both indicators predicted future fertility, unwanted births and contraceptive use, particularly among women who had a son. CONCLUSION: Both indicators are useful in understanding future fertility behavior. As the prevalence of son preference declines in India, the predictive ability of the indicators is likely to improve.

Do current measurement approaches underestimate levels of unwanted childbearing? Evidence from rural India.

The validity of estimates of unintended childbearing has often been questioned, especially given their almost exclusive reliance on responses to survey questions that ask women to recall their intentions about past pregnancies. An opportunity to compare prospective and retrospective descriptions of intendedness was provided by a follow-up survey in four Indian states in 2002-2003 of rural woman originally interviewed in the 1998-99 National Family Health Survey-2. The results demonstrate a pronounced tendency for births prospectively classified as unwanted to be retrospectively described as having been wanted or mistimed. The main reason seems to be either that mothers adapt to the reality of a new birth or are reluctant to describe an existing child as having initially been unwanted. Our findings suggest that retrospective accounts of the wantedness of a birth, such as those obtained by current Demographic and Health Surveys, may lead to significant underestimates of true levels of unwanted childbearing.

Breathers in a discrete nonlinear Schrödinger-type model: Exact stability results.

Following our earlier work [Phys. Rev. Lett. 84, 3570 (2000)] we present an exact linear stability analysis of one-site monochromatic breathers in a piecewise smooth discrete nonlinear Schrödinger-type model. Destabilization of the breather occurs by virtue of a growth rate becoming positive as a stability border is crossed, while above a critical spatial decay rate (lambda(c)) the breather is found to be intrinsically unstable. The model admits of other exact breather solutions, including multisite monochromatic breathers for which the profile variable (phi(n)) crosses a relevant threshold at more than one site. In particular, we consider exact two-site breather solutions with phase difference delta between the two sites above threshold, and present stability results for delta=pi (antiphase breather; the in-phase breather with delta=0 happens to be intrinsically unstable). We obtain a band of extended eigenmodes, together with a pair of localized symmetric modes and another pair of localized antisymmetric ones. The frequencies of the localized modes vary as the parameters characterizing the breather are made to vary, and destabilization occurs through the Krein collision of a quartet of growth rates, leading to temporal growth of a pair of symmetric eigenmodes of nonzero frequency. We clarify the limit N--> infinity (N is the gap length between the sites above threshold) when the two-site breather reduces to a pair of decoupled one-site breathers. The model offers the possibility of obtaining spatially random vortex-type breathers.