Utilization of maternal health care services could save unnecessary severe complications and death among women during pregnancy, delivery and after delivery. Numerous factors such as characteristics of the women and their family, characteristics of illness as well as characteristics of the health care system, including accessibility, acceptability, cost and quality of care, are contributed directly with the use of maternal health care.
The purpose of this study is to investigate the social, economic and demographic factors that affect women’s use of maternal health care in Indonesia. The data used for the study come from the 2007 Indonesia Demographic and Health Survey (IDHS), a nationally representative survey of ever married women 15 to 49 years of age. In order to asses the relationship
of social, economic and demographic factors on maternal health care utilization, this study used two levels of analysis, namely bivariate and multivariate analysis.
Both bivariate and multivariate analyses of the data confirmed that women’s exposure to media, women’s age, birth order and place of residence had a significant relationship with the utilization of antenatal care and modern delivery care. The women’s and husband’s education showed a strong relationship with maternal health care utilization, indicating higher use of
quality care for pregnancy and delivery by high educated women and by wives of high educated men. The bivariate analysis showed that almost all social, economic and
demographic variables are significantly associated with all forms of maternal health care, namely use of antenatal care, place of delivery and assistance during delivery. The only social variable which has a weak relationship with various form of antenatal and delivery care usage is women’s autonomy. The results of logistics regression indicate that women’s and husband’s education remain the most independent variables affecting all forms of antenatal and delivery care usage.
The interesting finding in this study is that in the multivariate analysis, women’s working status and husband’s occupation do not have a significant impact on the probability of women obtaining antenatal care and modern delivery care, although these variable, particularly husband’s occupation is positively and strongly associated with the dependent variables.