Autonomy among Muslim Women and Its Effect on the Use of Family Planning and Fertility: A Study of Lucknow City, Uttar Pradesh, India

Navaid Ali Khan, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)
R. Nagarajan , International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)

Gender is a salient source of social stratification across many societies, and the study of the autonomy and power of women relative to men reveals essential insights about women’s well-being. Many studies address that Muslim have poor socio-economic and demographic indicators and poor women autonomy because Islam is an obstacle to achieve autonomy or state of women empowerment. But many researchers argue that the autonomy of woman constructs under the social and cultural inspiration not religious. Poor socio-economic and demographic outcomes among Muslim are the results of the poor socio-economic condition not due to their religion. This paper examines the factors that contribute to the construction of women autonomy. Lucknow city has conditionally chosen through the availability of major three sects and more than 25 percent of the Muslim population. Both quantitative and qualitative approach for data collection has been used for the study. The study is based on primary data, and sample size of the study is 480 individuals. The time period of the study when the data had been collected was May 2018 to December 2018. The autonomy of women has used as a principal variable of the study. Knowledge and use of family planning methods have used as the dependent variable of the study. Principal component analysis, Bi-variate, Tri-variate, and logistic regression technique have used in this study. The study result shows autonomy of women is positive with socio-economic and demographic factors and significantly linked to the knowledge and use of family planning methods and fertility.

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 Presented in Session P1. Poster Session Fertility, Family and the Life Course