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Despite remarkable progress in past few decades India's current maternal and child mortality levels fall significantly short to attain many of the targets of MDGs. The variation in attainments across and within regions has always been a crucial dimension of Indian concerns. The present paper takes a closer look at the spatial variation of maternal and child healthcare status in India by summarising a set of constituent indicators that are instrumental in nature, and result in debilitating outcomes for women and their newborn. Taking the stock of information generated by the third round of District Level Health and Facility Survey (DLHS-3) this paper adopts the Pena Distance Method to gauge the spatial variations. The states are classified first in terms of their MCH status in 2007-2008. At later stage intrastate disparities are captured by measuring rural-urban inequality, and inter-district disparity within states. Key results indicate that the overall state ranking is, to a significant extent, explained by the intrastate variations. However, the major contribution of this paper lies in quantifying the relative role of constituent indicators that are responsible for the existing disparities across and within state boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India is committed to Millennium Development Goals regarding prenatal health but still the utilization of quality source of prenatal-care is lacking. In this paper an attempt has been made to examine the socioeconomic determinants of utilization of quality source of prenatal-care by the women in the age group of 15-49 years. Micro data having 25,896 observations from Indian Demographic Health Survey 2006 has been used. Binary logistic regression analysis is utilized to determine the association between the utilization of quality source of prenatal-care and explanatory variables categorized into demographic, socioeconomic, health and regional characteristics. Quality source of prenatal-care is defined as the prenatal-care taken from medical expert. The results have shown that age of woman at first marriage, husband's age, woman's education, husband's education, final say on woman's health-care by woman and husband collectively and husband alone, wealth index, female head of household, ever terminated pregnancy, household covered by insurance and husband's presence during prenatal visits increase the probability of utilization of quality source of prenatal-care. However, the combined family structure, birth-order of the child and living of the household in the town as compared the capital and large city decrease the probability of utilization of quality source of prenatal-care by Indian women. The implementation of law of minimum age for marriage, expansion in maternal health insurance, participation of husband in prenatal-care are proposed for enhancing the utilization of quality source of prenatal-care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As early as 1985, Rosenfield and Maine began to look at what is called the maternal child field (MCH). More than two decades later, maternal and infant mortality is still among the worst performing health indicator in resource-poor countries and regions, and it has barely changed since 1990. Although three of the eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals aim at reducing child mortality, maternal mortality, and promoting gender equality, most literature in the field is either clinical or exclusively deals with women's health problems. In this study, I proposed an empirical model that tests the impact of gender equality, women's human rights, and maternity care on MCH with economic and political development as background factors. The proposed model was tested by using structural equation analysis. Data were obtained from 137 developing countries. The proposed model is partially supported by the data. Empirical findings demonstrate that gender equality has a pivotal role to play in the promotion of MCH. The relationship between MCH and maternity care is found to be strong and statistically significant. This finding may permit a probable verification given the current social conditions in some developing countries, particularly the neglect of many of women's health needs and the assignment of their primary responsibilities in childrearing. The women's human rights hypothesis is not supported by the data. It is perhaps that human rights instruments provide a legal discourse for political functions and social welfare issues, but that the legal approach alone does not necessarily provide a moral and social foundation to ensure the implementation of social welfare and human well-being, particularly maternal and child health in developing countries. The findings also indicate the importance of economic development in predicting maternity care. Finally, a positive and statistically significant relationship is found between economic development and gender equality. Implications and limitations of the study are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]