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.