Women’s Autonomy and Control to Exercise Reproductive Rights: A Sociological Study from Rural Bangladesh

• Main Authors: Amit Kumar Biswas, Taufiq-E-Ahmed Shovo, Moutithi Aich, Sykat Mondal
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publishing 2017-06-01
• Series: SAGE Open
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244017709862

Women’s autonomy is a potentially noteworthy but less studied indicator of women’s control to exercise reproductive rights in a patriarchal country such as Bangladesh. The study is a sociological investigation that examined whether women’s autonomy matters or not in determining their control to exercise reproductive rights in rural Bangladesh. A survey was conducted on 200 randomly selected married women from Hogladanga village in the Bagerhat district of Bangladesh. We administered an interview questionnaire containing 27 Likert-type questions under three mutually interlinked domains for autonomy measures and 12 Likert-type questions under two mutually interlinked domains for reproductive rights status measures. The findings revealed that women’s autonomy status is strongly associated with their control to exercise reproductive rights status (β = .862, p < .001) along with both of the proxy variables, that is, sexual behavior index (β = .915, p < .001) and reproductive behavior index (β = .62, p < .001). The study findings suggest that women’s autonomy must be considered an important sociocultural determinant of higher control to exercise reproductive rights for young mothers in Bangladesh.