CCPR Seminar

"Death and Desirability: Retrospective Reporting of Unintended Pregnancy after a Child’s Death"

Abstract: Social scientists have long debated how to best measure pregnancy intentions. The standard approach in domestic and international surveys is to use mothers’ retrospective reports of their intentions at the time of conception. Because women have already given birth at the time of this report, their children’s health may influence their responses. Some fertility scholars have argued that mothers will be more likely to recall “lower quality”—that is, unhealthy—children as unintended. What about children who are no longer alive? In contemporary sub-Saharan Africa, where one in ten African children die before their fifth birthday, this research aims to understand whether women are susceptible to recalling deceased children, and the pregnancies from which they resulted, in a more positive light. Leveraging Demographic and Health Survey data from 31 sub-Saharan African countries, I will demonstrate how children’s health and vital status is associated with women’s retrospective reports of pregnancy intentions. The results challenge the reliability of standard measures of pregnancy intentions in high mortality settings, and thus our current knowledge of the levels and consequences of unintended pregnancies in these contexts.

"Restless Denominators"  

Abstract: This paper explores how denominators are used, misused, and—especially—how often they are missing, and to what effects. The paper makes three arguments. First, that denominators are essential in domains far beyond the quantitative disciplines that presently attend to them. In ethnography, in practical politics, in cultural studies, in everyday decision-making, we need to think much more about the pools of possible chances out of which emerge the events we observe. Second, denominators in the social sciences are much more intently theoretical objects than their usual treatment suggests, both in the sense that populations are not naturally bounded in the ways that many statistics imply, and in the sense that people do not merely find themselves randomly in certain populations facing certain risks, but rather participate in a variety of ways in their location. Finally, I argue that a classical demographic way of thinking about the denominator—as exposure to risk—offers an elegant way of integrating contemporary theory about uncertainty, agency, and habitus into formal quantitative research.

Vimeo Podcast

"Thirty-Five Years Later: Long-Term Impacts of the Matlab Maternal and Child Health Program on Migration and Labor Market Outcomes"

Abstract: Despite global proliferation of reproductive health and family planning programs, little is known about their long‐term effects. This talk introduces a project that provides causal evidence on the impact of the Matlab Maternal and Child Health and Family Planning Program (MCH‐FP) in Bangladesh, over thirty‐five years after it began. The Matlab Health and Socioeconomic Survey 2 (MHSS2) collected surveys and objective tests from a sample of 36,000 participants, including beneficiaries and their descendants, with followup of ~90% of migrants living outside the study area or abroad. I introduce the larger study in the context of evaluating MCH/FP program impacts on migration and labor market success. To the extent that family planning reduced competition for resources, the program may discourage migration among treated populations. However, to the extent that child health services increased human capital, treated individuals may be better positioned to migrate successfully. The results illustrate the importance of intensive migrant followup for reducing attrition bias.

"Health Equity in Family Planning and Family Planning Care: Putting the Focus back on Women"

Abstract: Differences in contraceptive use and unintended pregnancy by race/ethnicity are well described. Interpretation of these differences, and how they relate to the desire to achieve health equity, is complex due to the nature of reproduction, including the personal, social and historical context in which reproductive and contraceptive decisions are made. Lack of attention to these contextual factors has the potential to interfere with the ultimate goal of optimizing women’s reproductive health and to exacerbate health inequities. This talk will review data regarding women’s reproductive outcomes and how they vary by their sociodemographic characteristics, and discuss conventional approaches in both public health efforts and clinical family planning care to thinking about and responding to these data. I will then make the case for a woman-centered approach that focuses on individual’s preferences and conceptualizations of reproductive health as the best strategy to meet women’s needs and promote health equity.

View Podcast Here