Children are the future of any country.

IT was once thought that fertility below a level could not be achieved without changes in the material conditions of the people.

Health is a major issue in the women's movement, along with the struggle for justice, dignity and equality.

In l995, nurses and doctors in many of the public maternity ward in the state of Tamil Nadu in India were routinely inserting IUDs immediately following childbirth and abortions, as part of the target-orientated family, planning policy.

Kipling was paying tribute to the Vicereine who established the Fund associated with her name. This was an organisation which employed medical women (or 'lady doctors') to run a chain of hospitals and dispensaries all over India and Burma.

Undernourished women tend to deliver low birth weight babies (Karmer, 1987) and to have pregnancy complications (Baird, 1947). Perinatal mortality and prematurity rates were found to be high among short statured women (Barros, 1987).

In the absence of a basic questioning of women's status and role in society, birth control, abortions-and even maternal health care end up merely replacing an old set of traditions with new ones.

In this report, we propose new measures of wanted and unwanted fertility based on actual and wanted parity progression ratios, and we apply these procedures to NFHS data for eight states in India.