Reproductive health [1] practices among Muslim women in India have been little researched perhaps because of the widespread notion regarding the tight Islamic control over sexual behaviour and the sanctions against contraceptive use.

The notion of quality in the public health system is becoming increasingly an issue for policymakers and planners in India. The Eighth Five-Year Plan identified the poor quality of family welfare services as one of the factors

A confidential system of enquiry into maternal mortality, based on that used in England and Wales, was introduced in Malaysia in 1991 with a view to identifying deficiencies in care and recommending remedial measures.

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

There is a need to document women's perceptions regarding the quality of their health care, including abortion services, since most studies to date have approached this issue from the viewpoint of service providers, policymakers, or the state (Jesani and Iyer 1995).

In recent years there has been a growing concern in many countries, including India, that public health and family planning programs have placed insufficient emphasis on the quality of their services (Ickis 1992; Khan et al. 1994; Mensch 1993; Miller et al. 1991).

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.

In 1994, ICPD stressed gender equity as a precondition for health and development while affirming the need to address women's subordination in reproductive health programs. However, those responsible for implementing these broad goals still struggle with how to operationalise gender-aware approac

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.

The existing structural nature of women's work (domestic as well as non-domestic) has severe built-in hazards for women (reproductive and otherwise) which no amount of first rate quality of care, total coverage and/or access to health services alone can deal with.