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Title: Fertility and Child Health: The Relevance of the Contraceptive Context
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2022
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Abstract: Across sub-Saharan African societies where fertility decline is underway, children are born into dramatically different contraceptive contexts: some children reside in places where many women are actively using modern contraceptives, signaling the widespread nature of women’s control over their fertility, their agency, and trust in medical technology, whereas other children reside in contexts where exceedingly few women are contracepting. In this paper, we study whether the contraceptive environment is an underexplored dimension of the fertility context that is relevant to understanding contextual inequalities in children’s health. We analyze the Demographic Health Surveys Program data on 97,428 under-five-year-old children living in 292 subnational regions of 29 sub-Saharan African countries. The results reveal that children live in substantially varied contraceptive contexts, and multilevel logistic models show that this variation patterns child health: each percentage point increase in the prevalence of women using modern contraceptives is associated with 1.2% lower odds that a child is wasted, regardless of their demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, including their own mothers’ contraceptive behavior and fertility history. The results demonstrate that the contraceptive context is a unique summary feature of the fertility landscape—tapping into various dimensions of the broader psychosocial, gender, and health environments—that is relevant to the wellbeing of younger generations.
Url: https://www.ipums.org/impact/ipums-research-award
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Authors: Lin, Yingyi; Smith-Greenaway, Emily; Ferguson, Laura
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Data Collections: IPUMS Global Health - DHS
Topics: Fertility and Mortality, Health
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