BACKGROUND Women's autonomy in health-care decision is a prerequisite for improvements in maternal and child health. Little is known about women's autonomy and its influencing factors on maternal and child health care in Ethiopia. Therefore, this study was conducted to assess women's autonomy and identify associated factors in Southeast Ethiopia. METHOD A community based cross-sectional study...

The present study evaluated the extent to which eating-disordered and nonclinical comparison samples could be differentiated on self-reported personality measures of autonomy and sociotropy and a projective measure of dependency. Sixty-two women meeting diagnostic criteria for eating disorder and a nonpsychiatric comparison group of 62 women completed the autonomy and sociotropy subscales of th...

Women’s status is a multidimensional concept. A growing body of literature strongly suggests that gender inequality has a significant impact on the demographic transition and on the socio-economic development of countries. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationships between fertility and women’s autonomy in different cultural contexts. Data collected through three surveys conducte...

Individual autonomy in antenatal screening is internationally recognized and supported. Policy and practice guidelines in various countries place emphasis on the woman's right to make her own decision and are related to concepts such as self-determination, independence, and self-sufficiency. In contrast, the dominant perspective in Chinese medical ethics suggests that the family is pivotal in m...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the associations of women's autonomy and social support with infant and young child feeding practices (including consumption of highly processed snacks and sugar-sweetened beverages) and nutritional status in rural Nicaragua. DESIGN Cross-sectional study. Feeding practices and children's nutritional status were evaluated according to the WHO guidelines complemented with ...

Feminist attempts to empower women within their own cultural traditions have employed two broad strategies: authentic choice and participation. This paper argues that the methodological problems that beset the authentic choice strategy tell in favour of the participation approach. However, proponents of the participation strategy have failed to pay sufficient attention to the background conditi...

OBJECTIVES Male partners are often involved in induced abortion although they have no legal rights. It is, however, unknown how women's thoughts and feelings regarding the decision for abortion are associated with the decisional experiences of the involved male partners and vice versa. METHODS Flemish women and their involved male partners (IMP) filled out a questionnaire on abortion motives ...

The violence and de/reterritorializing strategies used by armed groups in Colombia disproportionally affect indigenous peoples, especially indigenous women, whose ethnogender roles, forms of territoriality, agency, and autonomy are being altered. Conflict and new forms of territoriality restrict the satisfaction of ethno-gender-based material needs and interests, with negative impacts on women’...

Despite various efforts to increase the utilization of skilled birth attendants (SBA), nearly two-thirds of deliveries take place at home without the assistance of SBAs in Nepal. We hypothesized that the ability of women to take decisions about their own lives-women's autonomy-plays an important part in birth choices. To know this, we conducted a community-based cross-sectional study for assess...

The aim of this exploratory study was to investigate the correlation between cultural and psychological factors in relation to predicting eating disorders in two different non-clinical Italian (n = 61) and Swedish (n = 31) female populations, thought to have different cultures and lifestyles. The Swedish sample would reflect an emancipated model of women pursuing autonomy and freedom but also a...