Violence during pregnancy and child birth weight in Uganda
Abstract
Physical violence and baby birth weight can be related to child outcome indirectly or directly.
Direct consequences of domestic violence during pregnancy include the premature rapturing of
the uterine membranes, infections that arise due to forced sexual relations with their partners,
placenta damages and contractions and also abdominal traumas
This study used secondary data among women in Uganda extracted from UDHS, 2016. Data was
analyzed using StataSE-15 (64bit) and analysis was done at two levels. Univariate analysis was
done to describe respondent`s background characteristics and bivariate was done to determine the
association between low birth weight and each of the independent variable using fixed p-value
0.05.
In accordance to the findings, wealth index, smoking, education levels and blood pressure during
pregnancy were not associated with low birth weight in Uganda (p>0.05) and other factors like
mothers’ age were associated with low birth weight in Uganda (p<0.005).
The government should look further into incidences of low birth weights in order to combat the
issues that lead to low birth weights.