Title: Age at Marriage, Fertility and Infant-Child Mortality in a Lahore Suburb (PART II)
Abstract: An exploratory study of 700 ever-married women was conducted in a suburb of Lahore city in 1973 in an attempt to gather knowledge concerning the major determinants of fertility and family size. A retrospective sample survey was used for collecting the data. From the sample of 700, average age at marriage has been computed for the females getting married during different periods of time. The mean age at marriage shows an increasing trend from decade to decade, and these increases have been found to be statistically significant. Of the 700 women, 674 have actually been pregnant and in this group there were 3691 pregnancies, an average of 5.5 pregnancies per woman. The total number of pregnancy wastages among these women was 174 or 47/1000 pregnancies. The total number of children ever born to these mothers was 3531 or an average of 5.2 children per mother. The overall average number of children born alive to the mothers whose age at marriage was under 15 is 5.4; for those married at the average age of 15, the number of children is 5; and for those with higher ages at marriage, the number of children ranges from 4.4 to 4.6. The marital age-specific fertility rate is slightly higher for the age group 15-19 but is lower for the ages 30 and above. The relationship of cumulative number of pregnancies and the number of pregnancy wastages experienced shows that the pregnancies of m others increase with more pregnancy wastages, but the average number for those who never experienced a loss was also high. This suggests that the use of contraception has not been sufficiently extensive to help limit the incidence of pregnancies. The patterns of cumulative fertility also suggest that the family planning program has done little to reduce fertility. A comparison of the average number of children ever born to the 700 women with that provided by the National Impact Survey shows little change over the 5 years intervening between the 2 studies.