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An analysis of postpartum contraceptive strategies— policies for preventive medicine
Journal article   Peer reviewed

An analysis of postpartum contraceptive strategies— policies for preventive medicine

Charles J. Mode and Gary Pickens
Mathematical biosciences, v 47(1), pp 91-113
1979
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/0025-5564(79)90007-5

Abstract

A need for testing the efficacy of strategies for accepting contraception following the birth of a child arises in the operation of family planning programs. Three classes of strategies may be distinguished. Firstly, there is a fixed time strategy; all women accept contraception in some fixed month τ following childbirth. Secondly, there is a postamenorrheic strategy; all women accept contraception immediately following the first postpartum menses. Thirdly, there is a mixed strategy; all women accept contraception right after their first postpartum menses or at some fixed time τ, whichever comes first. In addition to the postamenorrheic strategy, three fixed time strategies, with τ=1,6,18, and two mixed strategies, with τ=6, 18, were studied. The strategy which proved to be the most efficacious in preventing unwanted pregnancies in the numerical examples, representative of rural Bangladesh women, studied in this paper was the postamenorrheic. The results represent a reformulation and extension of the algorithms developed by Potter et al. (1979). Among other things, the results presented herein differ from those of these authors in that contraception may be reaccepted following discontinuation and attention is focused on calculating the distribution of the waiting times till conception rather than confining attention to its mean.

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