Anju Malhotra

Women's position and family planning in Egypt.

In this report, data from the 1988 Egypt Demographic and Health Survey are used to address some of the most frequently raised questions about the relationship between gender inequality and reproductive behavior. The findings from binomial and multinomial logit models show that while the relationship between womens position and fertility control in Egypt is complex, some clear, broad patterns exist that have important theoretical and policy implications. First, although womens status in Egypt is clearly multidimensional, the reproductive aspect of womens position has a strong connection with the nonreproductive dimensions. Second, the case of the continued use of education and employment as proxies of womens position, especially in relationship to fertility control, is considerably discredited by the results. Finally, the findings indicate that Egyptian culture supports gender equality in the form of interaction and negotiation rather than womens autonomy.

Women deliver for development.

There is a large amount of research into maternal health as a health issue, but maternal health as a development issue has been less explored. This Review analyses the evidence from the past 20 years on the links between maternal health and development to examine maternal health within a development framework. We note that although existing evidence suggests that these links are strong, further research is needed to definitively substantiate how and to what extent maternal health and development affect each other. Further, we find that progress and investment in maternal health have lagged far behind estimates of what is needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

Methodological Innovation in Studying Abortion in Developing Countries: A ‘‘Narrative’’ Quantitative Survey in Madhya Pradesh, India

This article describes the development and implementation of a mixed methods data collection method designed to provide high-quality data on the circumstances surrounding abortion in Madhya Pradesh, India. Data collection took place between 2000 and 2002, beginning with a qualitative phase and culminating in a large-scale, representative survey. The survey itself melded a unique narrative interviewing technique with quantitative survey techniques and collected information on 11,341 individual pregnancies from 2,444 women, with a 97% response rate. Abortion rates calculated using these data are found to be roughly five times higher than the National Family Health Survey-2, a comparable sample using more traditional interviewing techniques, suggesting that this approach reduces the underreporting of abortion while providing the contextual information often lacking in survey data.