Reproductive health among women refugees in host countries
Citation: Gagnon AJ, Merry L, Robinson C. A systematic review of refugee women’s reproductive health. Refuge. 2002;21(1):6-17.
Language: Abstract available in EN and FR. Full text available in EN.
Free to view: No.
Funding sources: Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec, McGill University Faculties of Graduate Studies and of Medicine (Canada).
What is this? In this systematic review, the authors searched for articles that compared physical or mental health indicators, or the use of services for reproductive health between women who were refugees and other women in the host country. They restricted their searches to studies published before 2001. The authors excluded studies of women in transit or refugee camps, and studies that they did not classify as high quality. They included 41 studies.
What was found: The authors found very few high-quality publications about the impact of refugee history on women’s health outcomes. Based on the included studies, women who were refugees from Indochina had a greater risk of low birth weight infants and were more likely to experience somatisation compared with other women in the USA.
Implications: The authors stated that the paucity of data on reproductive health events among women who were refugees made it difficult to provide population estimates and to make evidence-informed decisions about the distribution of resources.
Other considerations: The authors of the review discussed their findings in the context of race, ethnicity, culture, and language.
This summary was written by Joly Ghanawi, checked by Sydney Johnson and finalized by William Summerskill.