Male participation in family planning

Abstract

Before developing of modern contraceptives, males' domination in family planning was extra ordinal. The development of modern contraceptives such as hormonal contraceptives in 1960 and the subsequent development of intrauterine devices and surgical sterilization for women, led to the development of family planning service providers and community to focus on women, up to the extent of excluding men from family planning. However in Sri Lankan set up still the men domination is believed to be present concerned to family size and contraceptive use. In this purview a community based cross sectional descriptive study was conducted among 335 married men of reproductive age group in Kalmunai South MOH area to study the male participation in family planning. The overall contraceptive knowledge was moderate among the respondents. 95.2% of the respondents know at least one contraceptive method and 88.3% know at least two methods. The lowest knowledge was seen in the age group of 20 to 24years and the highest was found in age group of over 40 years. A positive association was found between level of education and contraceptive knowledge. Generally the knowledge is poor among lower socio economical groups. The attitude among the respondents is very much in favours to family planning. Practice of male contraceptive among the respondents is much higher (11.3%) than the national level (3.7%). The use of male partner dependent contraceptive (traditional) not very much lower (18.2%) than national figure (20.5%). 78% of the respondents discuss with their wife about family planning and in 74% of the families, the family planning decisions are taken by both partners jointly. The major portion of the contraceptive service is provided by the general practitioners (78.7%).