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 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.

Abortion is possibly the most divisive women's health issue that policy makers and planners face particularly in developing countries where safe abortion facilities are not available to most women. The health risk of abortion multiplies manifold if a woman has to resort to it repeatedly.

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 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.

Infertility has been relatively neglected as both a health problem and a subject for social science research in South Asia, as in the developing world more generally. The general thrust of both programmes and research has been on the correlates of high fertility and its regulation rather than on

Breast-feeding is the most important form of infant nutrition. Unfortunately there has been a steady decline in breast-feeding practices in the post industrialized era. Breast milk substitutes, a major threat to breast-feeding, are indeed a big business.

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.

A growing recognition that population dynamics, quality of life and women's status are closely inter related argues strongly for a fresh look at India's population program.

In many developing countries, women's activities, traditionally confined to the household, have changed over time.