In the last decade, several international and national movements have focused their attention, on the long neglected areas of women's reproductive health.

It is a hard reality that the social-cultural web has conditioned Indian women not to complain but to cope silently with their health problems and live with them. CHETNA team members exposed to this reality, by listening to voices of women.

This study tests the hypothesis that, in Nepal, measures of ideal family size mask an underlying preference for sons, making some people willing to have families larger than their ideal. Existing evidence suggests that men are likely to have stronger preferences for sons than are women.

Rapid advancements in medical technologies in recent years have opened the road to wide-ranging interventions in the sphere of reproduction. Significant among the technologies which facilitate such interventions and thereby

In 1931, the Fundamental Rights Resolution passed by the Indian National Congress adopted gender equality as a guiding principle.

The Government of India has adopted the 1994 Cairo agenda with speed and commitment at the highest level, recognising that improving reproductive health, including family planning, is essential to the development of the family welfare programme.

Bangladesh, with its characteristic high growth rate and population density,
widespread poverty, and very low literacy and standard of living, has faced no greater
problem than its ever-increasing population. Its size, composition and rate of growth of

Inter-spouse communication, though not a new dimension of fertility and family planning research, has remained much less explored in the Indian context than any other correlate of contraceptive use and current fertility.

Following the International Population and Development Conference in Cairo, there is widespread consensus in the international community that family planning programs must be people-centered, and further, that family planning programs should focus not just on contraception per se,but on the repro