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pubmed:otherAbstract |
PIP: With the realization of the importance of fertility studies, a national fertility survey was carried out in Nepal in 1976 by the Nepal Family Planning and Maternal and Child Health Project (MCP) in collaboration with the World Fertility Survey. The present study is based on data from this survey and examines fertility differentials by socioeconomic groups in Nepal. The present analysis concerns the information on children everborn to women by various regions and groups by marital durations. As many Nepalese ethnic groups practice child marriage, a careful distinction was made in the questionnaire between the date of marriage contracted and the start of cohabitation. Furthermore, if the age at cohabitation was less than the reported age at menarche, then the latter was instead taken as the initiation of potential fertility. Thus an attempt was made to define marriage in terms of the onset of exposure to risk of childbearing. The variables that are included in the study are region of residence, literacy of the respondent and her husband, educational attainment of the respondent and her husband, religion and ethnic group. Numbers of children everborn to these groups of women were standardized for marital duration of all women in order to establish whether the observed differences in children ever born are due to the variable itself or to differences in marital duration. Marital duration is found to have the greatest effect on fertility. In the shorter marital durations, the fertility of women marrying at younger ages seems to be depressed by the effect of adolescent sterility and subfecundity. There is a negative and statistically significant correlation between the age at marriage and mean number of children everborn. Women in the mountains have lower fertility than women in the hills and terai. The unstandardized mean number of children everborn seems to suggest that uneducated women have higher fertility than educated women, but when marital duration is taken into account there is virtually no difference in the number of children born. The number of children is lower among women whose husbands are educated and even with standardization for marital duration some difference remains, suggesting some direct effect. The education of women only indirectly affects fertility through age at marriage. However, the extremely low proportion of educated in the country means that this factor will have only a slight effect on fertility.
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