Definition
For women who gave birth in the last three to five years, ANCARD_ALL (M12_x) indicates whether they received an antenatal card for a pregnancy. Those who did not see anyone for antenatal care were assumed to have no antenatal card.
ANCARD_ALL consists of a set of six separate variables, covering the most recent birth (ANCARD_01) up to the sixth-most-recent birth (i.e., ANCARD_02, ANCARD_03, ANCARD_04, ANCARD_05, and ANCARD_06) during the reference period prior to the survey. If ANCARD_ALL is included in a data extract, all these separate variables are included in a researcher's data file.
For most surveys, information for this variable was collected on all births, up to a maximum of six, in the reference period; exceptions in which data were collected on only the most recent birth(s) are noted in the comparability section. In many cases, data were hypothetically collected on up to six births, but no women in the survey had so many births (e.g., no woman had 4 or more births in 3 years, or had 5 or 6 births in 5 years). If, for example, no woman in a survey had 6 births in five years and only blank values were included in the original DHS file, then ANCARD_06 would not be available for that survey in IPUMS-DHS.
