Reproductive Health Issues and Challenges for Health System Strengthening

‘Quality of care’ was the central conceptual thread in the concept of reproductive health. This was in clear deviation from the previous concepts that were target oriented and were engrained in the health programmes known by various names in the previous era: like Safe mother hood programme, or Child Survival and Safe Motherhood programme etc. This conceptual change had occurred due to understanding that in the race of achieving targets for contraception, quality is getting compromised, more people are getting complications and contraception service is adopted when already couples have produced many children. Thus there is hardly any impact on the fertility rate. Moreover, contraceptive choices were not offered and focus was only on permanent method.