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This article examines how the sex composition of women's current children at the start of a pregnancy interval influences both fertility desires and the full range of reproductive actions women may take to realize them, including temporary contraception, abortion and sterilization, in Madhya Pradesh, India, where popular notions of ideal family size and sex composition are dominated by son preference. The analysis is conducted using a dataset of 9127 individual pregnancy intervals from a 2002 statewide representative survey of 2444 women aged 15-39 with at least one child. The results indicate that women's preferences go beyond a singular preference for male children, with the preferred composition of children being two boys and one girl. Women with this composition are 90% less likely to report having wanted another pregnancy (OR 0.097, p < 0.01) relative to those with two girls. These preferences have significant implications for reproductive actions. While sex composition has no statistically significant effect on the use of temporary contraception, those with the preferred sex composition are twice as likely to attempt abortion (OR 2.436, p < 0.01) and twelve times more likely to be sterilized (OR 12.297, p < 0.01) relative to those with two girls only.

This article describes the development and implementation of a mixed methods data collection method designed to provide high-quality data on the circumstances surrounding abortion in Madhya Pradesh, India. Data collection took place between 2000 and 2002, beginning with a qualitative phase and culminating in a large-scale, representative survey. The survey itself melded a unique narrative interviewing technique with quantitative survey techniques and collected information on 11,341 individual pregnancies from 2,444 women, with a 97% response rate. Abortion rates calculated using these data are found to be roughly five times higher than the National Family Health Survey-2, a comparable sample using more traditional interviewing techniques, suggesting that this approach reduces the underreporting of abortion while providing the contextual information often lacking in survey data.

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Background: Child marriage, defined as marriage before the age of 18, is a human rights violation and is associated with numerous adverse health, social, and economic outcomes.  As such, the phenomena of child marriage garners substantial programmatic and policy action.   However, a better understanding of specifically how child marriage is or is not changing is needed. Methods: This study analyzes trends in the age structure of child marriage with cumulative incidence functions using data from Demographic and Health Surveys in four Asian countries.  It further uses equiplots and chi-square tests of independence to identify specific patterns of and trends in inequalities of child marriage across three socio-economic factors: education, wealth, and residence. Results: We find significant decreases in child marriage in all four countries since the 1990s.  The rate of change has been unevenly paced, with rapid increases in age at marriage followed by periods of little observable change.  Child marriage generally falls first during the youngest ages, followed by decreases in marriage later in adolescence.  Marriage remains an adolescent experience for the majority of women in Bangladesh and Nepal.  Child marriage is most common in Bangladesh and least common in Indonesia, while India has experienced the largest declines in child marriage.  There is no discernible trend toward non-marriage, but rather a trend toward delayed marriage only. We find widespread education-, wealth-, and residence-based inequalities, with child marriage concentrated among more disadvantaged groups.  Inequalities based on education are wider than either those based on wealth or residence.  Inequalities have mostly lessened over the previous decade, except in Nepal.  A pattern of mass deprivation is observed with regard to education, while wealth-based inequalities follow a queuing pattern.  Conclusions: These inequality patterns suggest delayed marriage be broadly promoted, alongside targeted interventions directed to the most disadvantaged groups.