Abstract
Despite well-acclaimed progress in numerous areas, India is still struggling to overcome the basic maternal mortality problem. Maternal mortality rate (MMR) is continuing to be an awful issue since decades. An important proximate determinant of maternal mortality is access and use of quality healthcare services. So in order to reduce the MMR, it is quite mandatory to maintain high quality of maternal healthcare utilisation. This article highlights maternal healthcare utilisation in terms of ‘antenatal care’ (ANC), ‘institutional delivery’ and ‘professional assistance at home delivery’. Muslim women are lagging behind the women of other religions in terms of socio-economic status. In view of the above, this article studies the patterns, determinants of maternal healthcare utilisation among Muslims and also strive to analyse differentials with national average and mothers of other religions. Data have been used from the three National Family Health Surveys (NFHSs), 1992–1993, 1998–1999 and 2005–2006. Bivariate and logistic regression techniques are used for the analysis and also multinomial regression is used to analyse ANC. Muslim mothers are relatively in low status in terms of ANC compared to mothers of other religions. They have been slightly moving forward as compared to mothers of other religions in terms of institutional delivery. Their maternal healthcare utilisation has increased steadily with education and standard of living. In addition, the likelihood for getting maternal healthcare increases with education, mass media exposure and husband status. Accessibility is a major problem for the non-user in utilising maternal healthcare.
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