Sex ratio is perhaps one of the most important sociodemographic indices which reflect the socio-economic and cultural ethos of a country, more so with reference to the status of its women.

India has the distinction of being the first country in the developing world to initiate a family planning programme-it later came to be called the Family Welfare Programme (FWP)-with a view to bring down the country's fertility level and contain population growth.

The importance of postpartum amenorrhoea for reducing fertility is especially pronounced in a developing country like Bangladesh where levels of contraceptive use have until recently remained relatively low. The duration of postpartum amenorrhoea in Bangladesh is among the longest in the world.

The planet is getting polarized in demographic and economic terms. Developing countries experience problems with their population growth along with pervasive poverty.

The high female infant mortality rates (Miller, 1985), the practice of female infanticide (Krishnaswamy, 1988), the neglect of female children with regard to access to health services, nutrition (Sen and Sengupta 1983) and education (Mankekar, 1985), and the sexual abuse of girls (Bhalerao, 1985)

The recent decline in fertility in Bangladesh froin a total fertility rate of 6.3 children per women in 1975 to 3.5 in 1995 (MHPC, 1978:73; BBS, 1996) has created interest among researchers, policy makers and academicians.

This paper discusses contraceptive use and discontinuation among women in north Vietnam, in the context of a strong culture preference for sons and a stringent two-child population policy. Among a random sample of 1432 married women aged 15-49 in a rural province in north Vietnam in l994, nearly

Both as a concept and as a rallying point for gender-based concerns, the emergence of reproductive choice is a relatively new phenomenon in the area of population policy. For decades on end, population policy had been primarily, if not solely, concerned with the regulation and control of human fe