Fear of child birth and associated factors among pregnant mothers who attend antenatal care service at Jinka public health facilities, Jinka town, Southern Ethiopia

Abstract

BackgroundWomen face many challenges from conception to postpartum and fear of childbirth is one of the challenges the women encounters during pregnancy. This could have been resulted from different perspectives and it could intern lead to various pregnancy and child birth problems. Thus, understanding child birth fear and factors associated with this is of paramount importance and this study was aimed at addressing this issue.MethodologyA facility base cross sectional study was done on 423 pregnant mothers who came for antenatal care services at Jinka hospital and Jinka health center. The study was conducted from June 01 to 30, 2018. Sample size was calculated using single population proportion formula and samples was taken after proportional allocation was done for the hospital and health center using proportion allocation formula. Individual participants were selected with systematic sampling technique using k- value of 2 for both the hospital and health center and the first participant was selected by lottery method from the first two samples. Data were entered in to epi-data version 3.1.1.and exported in to statistical packages for social sciences version 21.0 for cleaning and further analysis. Level of significance was declared at p-value less than 0.05 in multivariable logistic regression model. Narratives, figure and tables were used to put the result.ResultFrom 423 samples, two of the questionnaires were incomplete and thus 421 were used for analysis giving a response rate of 99.5%. Around a quarter of 102 (24.2%) mothers had fear of child birth and the remaining 319 (75.8%) had no fear of child birth. From the factors under consideration, history of previous pregnancy complication, previous history of labor and delivery complications, educational status and depression status were significantly associated with mother’s fear of child birth.ConclusionEven though it is physiological to have some fear of child birth, the figure obtained is relatively higher. Factors found to have significant effect on child birth fear are those which could be tackled through improved health literacy and integrated maternal health services