Demand of Prenatal Care for Pregnant Women with Health Problems

This is the first research to deal with prenatal care for pregnant women with morbidity using 2005 NHI data. Both Poisson and Logistic regression are used in the estimations. The results show that parities, mother’s age, mother’s education level, geographic location, and hospital ownership play important roles on both the probability of adequate prenatal care use and the frequency of prenatal care visits. WHO recommends a minimum of 4 prenatal care visits during pregnancy; however, 1.84 % of those medically high-risk women have less than 4 visits and only 88.2% have more than 5 visits, while 80% have adequate prenatal care use. Keywords: Prenatal Care, Morbidity, High-Risk, Kessner Index, NHI