The Association Between Infertility and Highly Educated Working Women and its Residence-Wise Prevalence: Insights from India

Abstract

Background At the present time, after giving birth to one or two, couples usually use some method of family planning. But if women are unable to conceive a child, known as infertility, is a medical problem and carries serious demographic, social, as well as health consequences. In the present study, an attempt has been made to study the relationship between infertility and highly educated working women after controlling for certain socioeconomic and demographic variables and efforts have been made to see this difference between urban and rural residing women. Methods The information about infertile women is collected from 40,401 currently married women aged 20–35 in India using National Family Health Survey data conducted in 2015-16. Bivariate analysis along with unadjusted and adjusted logistic regression is used to access the relationship of our objective. Results Findings of the bivariate analysis revealed that among 40,401 currently married women 3782 (9.4%) women are infertile in India. Out of 3782 infertile women, 1242 (10.7%) reside in urban and 2540 (8.8%) in rural areas. Findings of logistic regression analysis show that women are 20% more likely to be infertile if they are highly educated as well as have a job. When we saw this interaction effect by place of residence, we found that women living in urban areas had a 1.32 (95% CI 1.126–1.876) times increased likelihood of infertility compared with those without this interaction effect whereas rural women had an increased likelihood of infertility by 1.06 (95% CI 1.008–1.536) times. Respondent’s age and overweight were also found to be positively associated factors of infertility in urban as well as rural areas. Although the wealth index is only a potential predictor of infertility in urban areas, its effect on infertility in rural areas is minor. Conclusions In India education and wealth index both are increasing day by day. Due to the increasing level of education and other knowledge in society, we observe age at marriage is also increasing particularly in the urban areas, also the intention to have less number of children in the highly educated and higher socio-economic status groups is observed, and this creates another medical burden called infertility which is an emerging issue across the world, especially in India. In fact, Infertility is not only a medical burden but also affects the married life of women. Thus, there is a need to focus on this issue and make people aware of it through various programs.