Royal Statistical Society
Meeting of the Social Statistics Section
Maternal Health in Developing Countries
24 March 2009, 5.00pm, at the Royal Statistical Society (tea from 4.30pm)
Revealing the costs of reproduction in Gambian women: using multilevel,
multiprocess models to analyse the adverse health consequences of
child-bearing
Rebecca Sear, London School of Economics and Political Science
The high energetic costs of child-bearing are predicted to lead to a decline
in health in women who have high fertility. Such costs of reproduction have
proven difficult to demonstrate empirically, however, perhaps because only
women in good health can sustain high fertility. We use a multilevel,
multiprocess model to control for this endogeneity between health and
fertility in order to analyse whether child-bearing does have adverse health
consequences in a high fertility Gambian population.
How high is too high? Rising c-section rates in developing countries
Tiziana Leone, London School of Economics and Political Science
Caesarean section rates have risen dramatically in several developing
countries, especially in Latin America and South Asia. This raises a range
of concerns about the use of c-section for non-emergency cases, not least
the progressive shift of resources to non-essential medical interventions in
resource-poor settings and additional health risks to mothers and newborns
following c-section. Only few studies analyse how countries compare in terms
of the factors that influence the recent increase in caesarean rates. In
particular it is not clear whether high elective c-section rates are driven
by medical, institutional or individual and family's decisions. This
presentation will firstly analyse the issues related to the increase in
c-sections in developing countries and secondly the results of a study that
shows how institutional, socio-economic and community factors influence
caesarean section in six countries: Bangladesh, Colombia, Dominican
Republic, Egypt, Morocco and Vietnam.
The meeting will take place at the Royal Statistical Society headquarters,
12 Errol Street, London, EC1Y 8LX (see
http://www.rss.org.uk/about/direction.html for a map and directions).
The meeting is open to all and free of charge, but pre-registration is
recommended. Please email [log in to unmask] or telephone: 020 7638 8998.
For more information please contact: [log in to unmask]
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