[Family planning]

According to the fact that a great majority of women have expressed their wish to have only two children, two main questions have arised: what are the means that women use to limit their family size and what are the acceptable measures which the society can undertake to avoid further decline of crude birth rate in order to attain a stable population. Except for Kosovo and Macedonia, namely, in all other parts of Yugoslavia depopulating trends are present. Adequate data about contraceptive prevalence are not available, and according to some partial data, even among the women wanting no additional children, the percent of those planning no use of contraception is as high as 17.3 and further 21.2% are planning to rely on less effective contraceptive methods. The result of this situation is a relatively high number of induced abortions in Croatia 1989: 43227 or 77.7 per 100 live births). To improve this unfavourable situation, medical profession has to promote a wider use of contraception in general, particularly with more effective methods. Unfavoured decline of crude birth rate could be corrected, however, only through complex activities of long duration in order to achieve thorough improvement of the standard of living. With these improved living conditions more women would, most probably, want to have more than two children, thus avoiding the present depopulating trends in some parts of the country. On the other hand, any restriction of legal rights and availability of fertility regulation methods would be fully anachronistic and therefore unacceptable, since the only predictable result would be the increase of illegal abortions with all the well-known health risks and life-threatening conditions.