Understanding the association between family planning and fertility reduction in Southeast Asia: a scoping review

We aimed to explore and understand the extent and type of evidence on fertility reduction and its association with family planning (FP) in Southeast Asia.

Scoping review, following the methodological principles developed by Arksey and O'Malley and Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews guidelines for reporting.

We searched PubMed/MEDLINE, ProQuest, EBSCO, Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar and reference lists of relevant articles between 1 January 2012 and 31 December 2022. Only open-access articles in English were considered.

For inclusion, observational studies were selected for eligibility based on the original articles investigating the uptake of FP on women aged 15-49 years and its association with fertility decline in Southeast Asian (SEA) countries.

Two reviewers screened the records independently for eligibility and extracted all data. The specific details of the studies, including data on the authors, year of publication, setting, study design, aims/objectives of the study, specific intervention, outcomes and main findings, were reported.

We retrieved 615 articles and retained 12 articles included in the analysis. Of these, 11 were quantitative studies and 1 was qualitative study. The frequently reported strategy of FP was the use of contraception. FP not only allows women to control their birth by spacing and limiting their pregnancies but also delay their first childbirth by using contraceptive methods.

Our review suggests that the FP programmes aiming at reducing fertility should have a specific focus on improving the uptake and continuation of FP services.