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MOTHER SINGLEHOOD AT FIRST BIRTH AND MORTALITY RISKS OF FIRST- AND LATER-BORN CHILDREN: THE CASE OF SENEGAL

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2018

Nathalie Guilbert
Affiliation:
Agence Française de Développement and PSL Université Paris Dauphine LEDa, IRD, UMR DIAL
Karine Marazyan*
Affiliation:
Université Paris 1
*
Address correspondence to: Karine Marazyan, Université Paris 1 - IEDES- IRD UMR 201 Développement et Sociétés; e-mail: karine.marazyan@univ-paris1.fr
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Abstract

This paper investigates the extent to which being born to a single mother affects a child’s survival rate in Senegal, a context where girls’ premarital sexual relationships are still widely stigmatized. It also examines whether any negative effect persists up to affecting the survival rate of children of higher birth order born after the mother has married. Using data from Demographic and Health Survey, we find that the mortality rate is higher for first-born boys, but not for first-born daughters, whose mother was single at the time of their birth, and lower for second-born children whose sister, but not brother, was born out of wedlock. The latter effect is actually driven by children from older cohorts of women. Therefore, strategies to mitigate the negative consequences of the stigma associated with a premarital birth seem to exist but vary with the gender of the child born premarital in Senegal. In addition, persisting negative effects appear to have decreased over time. Potential channels through which boys born from a single mother are at a higher risk of death in the country are discussed. Overall, our findings indicate that social programs targeting single mothers, especially when they gave birth to a boy, would help avoiding dramatic events as the death of a child.

Type
Research Papers
Copyright
Copyright © Université catholique de Louvain 2018 

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Footnotes

We are grateful to Philippe De Vreyer, Sylvie Lambert, Sandrine Meslé-Somps and Dominique Van de Walle for precious advice on previous versions of this work, as well as participants of DIAL seminar (in Paris) and CEPS workshop on Population and Development (in Luxembourg) for their helpful comments. Remaining errors are ours.

References

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