Interlinkages Between Intimate Partner Violence and Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes among Indian Women

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is not only confined to impacting women’s physical, mental and sexual health but also imposes adverse health outcomes on growing fetus with higher rates of unwanted pregnancy outcomes and induced abortions. The present study aims to investigate the association between self-reported experience of IPV and pregnancy termination among Indian women based on the analysis of data from the fifth round of the Indian demographic and health surveys. IPV was measured using physical, sexual and emotional violence questions from state module of NFHS-5. To address the objectives, Logistic regression was employed to examine the association between IPV and adverse pregnancy outcomes. Further, Propensity Score Matching analysis was applied to understand the impact of IPV on adverse pregnancy outcomes. It was found that prevalence of pregnancy termination was around 20%, 23% and 20% among women experiencing physical violence, sexual violence and emotional violence respectively. Those experiencing IPV were more likely to have pregnancy termination [OR: 1.43, 95% CI:1.37–1.50 in unadjusted model, and OR: 1.4, 95% CI:1.34–1.47 in adjusted model]. Results also indicated that experience of IPV increases the risk of pregnancy termination by 5.9 percent compared to the matched control group. To conclude, this study confirms an association between induced abortions, pregnancy loss, and intimate partner abuse. The widespread prevalence of IPV in the country can have substantial implications on the prevalence of unintended pregnancy outcomes. Thus, it is important to have policies aimed at reducing IPV and improving contraception usage which can lower the unintended pregnancy outcomes.