Original ArticlesPhysical violence during pregnancy: maternal complications and birth outcomes☆
Section snippets
Materials and methods
We analyzed data from the South Carolina Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System,11 a population-based survey developed to monitor selected self-reported maternal behaviors and experiences occurring before, during, and after pregnancy among women who delivered live-born infants. A systematic birth weight–stratified random sample of new mothers (200–240 women) was drawn monthly from the South Carolina birth registry. Because of the low frequency of births of LBW infants in the population,
Results
Eleven percent of women reported physical violence (either “being physically hurt by husband or partner” or “being involved in a physical fight”) within the 12 months of delivering a live infant (Table 1). The prevalence of being involved in a physical fight during the year before delivery (9.6%) was twice as high as the prevalence of partner-perpetrated physical violence (5.1%). Also shown in Table 1 are the mutually exclusive categories of physical violence during pregnancy. Those data showed
Discussion
Violence against women is difficult to measure for various reasons, including the fact that a standardized definition is lacking, and the fact that some women are unwilling to disclose violence, because of social stigma or cultural sanctioning of violence.16 Thus, the best prevalence estimates are probably underestimates. Given this and the similar effects on maternal outcomes of being involved in a fight, we included data on women’s involvement in fights in our assessment of physical violence
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This research was funded in part by Collaborative Agreement U50/CC407132 from the Division of Reproductive Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia.