What is it about?
About half of all pregnancies in the world are considered unintended. But can we rely on standard survey questions to identify women at risk of unintended pregnancies? In research carried out in Nigeria, we experimented with new ways of asking women whether they want to have another child soon, in which we vary the degree of confidentiality of responses. We find that, when their individual responses are fully confidential, women are about 20% less likely to say that they want to avoid a pregnancy, suggesting that there may be fewer unintended pregnancies than previously thought.
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Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Why is it important?
The fact that many pregnancies are unintended motivates a vast global family planning effort to address persistently high unmet needs for contraception. Our research suggests that, in some cases, the problem may be overstated. Improving how we measure pregnancy desires would lead to a better targeting of limited family planning funding to groups who most need it.
Perspectives
I am passionate about understanding how to better align women's fertility desires with their fertility outcomes. I hope that the fresh look this article takes on how we measure fertility desires will help move in this direction.
Christine Valente
University of Bristol
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Are self-reported fertility preferences biased? Evidence from indirect elicitation methods, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 2024, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2407629121.
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