More younger, educated women are now giving birth at unsafe intervals: Data

Indian women aged 15 to 29 years and those with more years in school gave birth at shorter, unsafe intervals over the decade to 2015-16, shows an IndiaSpend analysis of health data.

Birth intervals–the time between two successive live births–of less than 24 months may lead to low birth weight and death of a child, according to the 2015-16 report of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS).

The optimal birth interval to reduce neonatal and infant mortality is three to five years, according to global research (here and here). In India, spacing between births for women aged 15-29 years worsened from 25 months to 22.5 months over 10 years, we found.

The median interval between two live births fell by 2.5 months to 22.5 months in 2015-16 from 25 months in 2005-06 for women aged 15-19 years and by 6 days to under 29 months from 29 months for women aged 20-29 years, according to our analysis of data from 2005-06 and 2015-16.

“It is difficult to comment without looking at disaggregated NFHS data, which has not been released yet for 2015-16,” said a New Delhi-based demographer, requesting anonymity. “We will need to look at how many of the earlier-born children to women in the 15-19 age group were alive or dead and then check for confounding factors. With India’s high neonatal mortality rate, it is possible that median birth intervals in younger women have gone up among those whose children died soon after being born.”

The legal age for marriage in India is 18 for women and 21 for men. Underage marriages, especially of girls, rose in urban India–one in five girls between ages 10 and 17 in urban areas was married in 2011–and while the immediate reasons were not clear, patriarchy and the continuing hold of tradition are implicated, as IndiaSpend reported on June 9, 2017. By age 22, 56% of women were married, according to an ongoing global study of childhood poverty in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, IndiaSpend reported on November 17, 2017.