Development of Reproductive Health of Women in theCR during 1993-1997

Overview

Objective:
1) Overall objective is to detect changes in reproductive health of women due to chan-ges in the system of social and health care. 2) The particular objective of this part of the study(part V) is to compare the incidence of induced abortions and contraceptive use in the CzechRepublic and selected developed countries during last 20 years.Design: Retrospective comparative epidemiological study.Setting: Institute for the Care of Mother and Child, Praha 4 - Podolí.Methods: Input data for the Czech Republic use came from the results of the four previous parts ofthe study. The data from similar studies in selected countries were divided into two groups. Sevencountries of Central Europe formed the first group, the second group consisted of 14 countries ofWestern and Northern Europe and 4 developed countries over-the-ocean. The both groups wereordered according to the reliability of reported data.Results: The cause of higher number of induced abortions and lower number of women usingeffective contraception in the Czech Republic compared to other developed countries falls intosixties when different social approach towards induced abortion legislation and concurrent deve-lopment of planned parenthood began. This is being documented by comparison of data on use ofinduced abortions and contraceptive use among women of different age groups, while usinginternationally accepted indicators. Although the number of induced abortions did not changesubstantially in western countries during last 20 years (there has been even slight increase insome of them since 1993), the number of induced abortions in the Czech Republic decreasedmarkedly, and this fact, together with increased use of contraception since 1993 led to decrease ofdifference in between these two variables, compared to western countries.Conclusions: The 2-3 fold higher number of induced abortions in the Czech Republic than incountries of the second group before 1993 decreased substantially; there were only 19.3 inducedabortions per 1000 women in the Czech Republic in 1997 compared to average of 14.1 inducedabortions in developed countries. Use of effective contraceptive methods is lower in the CzechRepublic due to low use of sterilization.

Key words:
epidemiology, induced abortion, contraception, abortion rate, abortion ratio