ENCOUNTERING MEN’S UNMET NEED FOR FAMILY PLANNING

Recently, increased attention has been given to unmet need for family planning in developing countries, but men''s unmet need often remains unrecognized. Even though men play traditional patriarchal role in Bangladesh but they become invisible when comes to using contraceptives. This book introduces a complex relationship between men''s unmet need for family planning and power relations that can be observed in terms of communication between spouses, age gap between spouses, and socio-economic status, involving individual-level and household-level variation. Men have more unmet need to limit births and space births if women do not have power in the household. If the age gap between spouses'' increases, men experience more unmet need for limiting births but less for spacing births. If men and women disagree with each other about fertility preferences, men are more likely to experience unmet need for limiting and spacing births. To address men''s unmet need for family planning a broad approach with emphasis on men''s needs to be taken. This book is for those who realize that unmet need for family planning is significantly responsible for stagnant population growth of Bangladesh.