BACKGROUND A range of formal and informal close-to-community (CTC) health service providers operate in an increasingly urbanized Bangladesh. Informal CTC health service providers play a key role in Bangladesh's pluralistic health system, yet the reasons for their popularity and their interactions with formal providers and the community are poorly understood. This paper aims to understand the fa...

After nearly a century of failed or incomplete legislative efforts, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), enacted by Congress in March 2010, establishes the principle that every American is entitled to affordable and effective health insurance coverage regardless of income or health status. Although many aspects of the act have received broad attention, its impact on reproduct...

BACKGROUND Adolescents giving birth represents an important public health issue with social, economic, and health-related consequences. OBJECTIVE Compare birth rates and trends in birth rates among adolescents age 15-19 years in Wisconsin and the United States by race/ethnicity. METHODS Teen birth rates from 1998-2002, and trends in birth rates from 1995-2002 for Wisconsin and the United St...

School-based health centers (SBHCs) are a policy innovation designed to increase health care access among youth. The centers offer primary and acute care, often to underserved populations. We describe SBHCs, trace their history, and analyze the three great political challenges they face: moral opposition triggered by concern about reproductive health services in schools; funding in a managed ca...

The aim of this paper is to define a set of proposals to inform European institutions in the regulation of Conscientious Objection to abortion. The board of the European Society of Contraception and Reproductive Health Care (ESC) was informed on the elements that should in the opinion of the authors be included in a future regulation of Conscientious Objection to abortion in Europe. These eleme...

AIM to examine and compare the viewpoints of women who have sought reproductive health care at units applying the health sector reform programme in two governorates, Menoufia and Alexandria, in Egypt. METHODS a two-stage cluster sampling method was used in which four health units were randomly selected from these two governorates. Cluster sampling was again used to select households from the ...

This study sheds light on obstacles to safe sexual health for young Thais and their need for appropriate sexual and reproductive health services. The study population was 1,745 unmarried adolescents aged 17-20 who resided or worked in Chiang Mai, the major city in northern Thailand. The study used quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the vulnerability of sexually active adolescents a...

Background: Adolescence is an important period in human life and the low-level access of adolescents to reproductive and sexual health services is a concern because preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic services are needed for healthy sexual and reproductive behaviors. This study was conducted with the aim of considering the barriers against adolescent access to repro...

BACKGROUND Publicly funded family planning clinics provide contraceptive care to millions of poor and low-income women every year. To inform the design of services that will best meet the contraceptive and reproductive health needs of women, we conducted a targeted survey of family planning clinic clients, asking women about services received in the past year and about their reasons for visitin...

BACKGROUND In Burma, severe human rights violations, civil conflict, and the persecution of ethnic and linguistic minority populations has resulted in the displacement of millions of people, many of whom now reside as internally displaced populations (IDPs) in Eastern Burma or in Thailand as refugees or undocumented migrants. Use of the intra-uterine device (IUD), a non-user dependent and highl...