Background: Family planning plays a pivotal role in reducing high fertility and its negative effects on health and development.
Objective: To assess the influence of women’s autonomy and husband's involvement on couple's contraception use.
Methods: An unmatched, case-control study was conducted from January to February 2005 in Jimma town. Cases were couples, who were using modern contraceptive methods during the study period and the controls were couples, who were not using any contraceptive methods at least for two years prior to the study period. The cases and controls were identified from a baseline survey conducted for the study.
Results: A total of 173 cases and 169 controls were interviewed. Accordingly, fertility and husbands involvement variables were found to be the most important determinants for couple’s contraception use, once adjusted for all the independent variables. Couples who openly discuss about family planning and wives who perceive that their husbands approve of family planning, were more likely to be current contraception users than their counterparts (OR, 2.5, 95% CI 1.1-5.9 & OR, 6.8, 95% CI 1.7-23.9 respectively). On the contrary couples who had a history of child death were less likely to be current contraception users than couples who had no history of child death (OR, 0.2, 95%CI, 0.1-0.6). Except literacy, women’s autonomy variables were not found to have a significant effect on couples' contraception use. Conclusion: Since men's involvement in family planning is crucial, both partners should be targeted for community based family planning counseling. Husband-wife communication should also be encouraged during clinic based family planning counseling sessions. Efforts to improve child survival should be strengthened. [Ethiop.J.Health Dev. 2006;20(3):145-151]