Covariates of Early Childbearing in Bangladesh

Abstract

Early childbearing means the early growth that is the growth capacity of teen age’s women. It is apparent that early childbearing vary with varying demographic and socio-economic variables. Very little attention is given as to how to capture the pattern of early childbearing with respect to age, age at marriage, duration of marriage, children ever born as well with varying socio-economic situation like education of women, education of husband and working status of women and so on. Among the studies available, most of the focus on the consequence for developed countries. Since relatively lower attention has been given to one of the major influential factors of fertility decline in Bangladesh, the early childbearing. Early childbearing in human population is the achieved fertility of a woman or a group of women less than 20 years of age. While On-time childbearing involves less, both early and delayed childbearing involve high-risk also involves in having children in quick succession as well as in having children more than three or four. Thus childbearing occurs early or late, in quick succession and at higher parity (more than 3 or 4) involves high-risk and beyond these have some low-risk. Admitting that every pregnancy expulsion involves risk - more or less. The present study is an attempt to analyze the childbearing pattern that are termed as high-risk and low-risk and try to isolate the factors that discriminate and affect significantly the high-risk and low-risk pattern in the context of current age of women. Methodology The study uses 11 variables that include age of women, age at first marriage, duration of marriage, contraceptive use, place of residence, religion, education of women, education of husband, women's work status, occupation of husband and total children ever born. Such data are available from the 2004 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) implemented through a collaborative effect of the National Institute of Population Research and Training (NIPORT), Mitra and Associates, and ORC Macro (USA). Multi-stage random sampling was used to obtain the data. Data were obtained from all the administrative geographical divisions of Bangladesh. A total of 11440 ever-married women aged 10-49 were interviewed to collect data concerning fertility levels, contraceptive, infant mortality levels to improve the lives of mothers and children. There are 1703 ever-married women are eligible for our study ( <20 years) out of 11440. Aside from rates and ratio used in the analysis of data, the study uses x2-analysis to test the association between the attributes of risk of childbearing classified as high-risk and low-risk in terms of age indicates socio­economic and demographic phenomena. The study also employed by two sophisticated statistical techniques namely, discriminant and logistic regression analysis. Findings It is evident that early childbearing performance vanes greatly with differences in religion, education residential status and so on. Majority of women (90.5 percent) are not currently working outside home. A considerable 70.8 percent of women live in rural area. About 28.1 percent of the study population has no formal education. About 65.6 percent women do not use contraceptive methods. It was found that the variables viz., education of women, contraceptive use, women's working status, occupation of husband, duration of marriage, age at first marriage are the most significantly associated. The variables that significantly discriminate the high-risk childbearing from the low-risk childbearing are marital duration, age at marriage, mother's education, place of residence, women's work status, religion and contraceptive use. It was also found that the most significant variables that influence both the high-risk and low-risk childbearing are marital duration, contraceptive use, mother's education, age at marriage, religion, place of residence and women work status.