In India, preference for sons undermines desire for smaller families, or slowing decline in population growth.
Despite a strong family planning program and a growing desire for smaller families, women in India often have more children than they wold like because of a longstanding preference for sons over daughters.
A new study exploring this issue finds that continued childbearing driven by son preference accounts for 7% of all births in the country.
According to "The Desire for Sons and Excess Fertility: A Household-Level Analysis of Parity Progression in India," by Sanjukta Chaudhuri of the University of Wisconsin, women were more likely to stop having children if their last child had been a son rather than a daughter.
The author also found a strong relationship between family size and the proportion of female children in a family.
Son preference has come into conflict with the desire for smaller families in many parts of South, East and Central Asia, where a much higher value is placed on men than on women.
This analysis, which used data from India's 2005-06 National Family Health Survey on women aged 35-49 who had at least one child, found that the disire for sons is a key driver of women having another child.
Indian women without any sons are more likely to continue having children than those whose first child was a son, and women shose first two children were daughters were more likely to have another child than those whose first two children were sons.
As a result, Indian girls are likely to grow up in larger families than boys do; in such families, fewer resources are available to each child, and girls are likely to receive a smaller share of those resources than their brothers, leading to gender disparities in health, education and other outcomes.
To read the full release, click on http://www.guttmacher/org/media/nr/2013/01/14/index/html
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