International Journal of Research in Social Sciences

Maternal health of women and children will be improved only if women utilize the health services by antenatal care visits regularly, complications if any will be rectified and high risk deliveries will be reduced and thus reduction of both MMR and IMR. Two district of Tamil Nadu namely Madurai and Dindigul are selected and 2 municipal Corporations of Dindigul and Madurai were selected as study area. 460 Women aged 15–49 years old were interviewed using Probability proportional to size sampling method and the adopted an analytical study design. The data was analyzed using SPSS16. The objective of this paper is to determine the factors associated with antenatal care seeking behavior of women in urban slums in Tamil Nadu. A higher per cent of women (86 per cent) living in urban slums have availed antenatal care services, 68 per cent of women utilized their AN services from government/municipal hospitals, 19 per cent of women received AN care from private hospital/clinic, 8 per cent of women received AN services from UPHC/UFWC and 2 per cent of women received from government dispensary, NGO/Trust hospital each. Among women received AN care services, 76 per cent of women registered within 3 months of pregnancy. Sixty one per cent of women aware about pregnancy related problems, 68.5 per cent of women suffered from pregnancy related problems, 79 per cent of women treated for the pregnancy problem. Among treated, 71 per cent of women treated at government health facilities and the remaining 29 per cent of women treated at private health facilities. Chi square analysis was carried out to understand the association between AN Care of women with socio economic and demographic characteristics. Type of family, mass media exposure and health seeking behavior of women are significantly associated with utilization of antenatal care of women and is significant at 5% level (p<0.05). Women who are living in joint family system, women with high level of mass media exposure and women with high level of health seeking behaviorare more likely to avail full antenatal care than their counterparts.