Maternal health around planned and unplanned births
Presented by: Anna Barbuscia (Ined)
Discussant: Sandra Florian (INSERM)
Résumé
VThis study examines women’s health in the years following unplanned and planned births in France. Unplanned births are very common in many developing and developed countries including France, and have been linked with a number of negative outcomes for children and parents. However, evidence about women’s health following the birth is scarce, and has failed to demonstrate whether negative outcomes might be related to the birth or rather to the socio-demographic conditions where unplanned births are more likely to occur. On the other hand, a rich literature has shown that health levels decrease in the years after childbirth, however without considering fertility intentions. We use data from the large Constances Cohort study, which started in 2012 and includes now more than 200,000 individuals. We applied fixed effects and difference-in-difference models to compare changes in women’s self-rated health up to 5 years after experiencing unplanned and planned births (N=23,424), while controlling for maternal characteristics and health levels before the birth.
Biographie de Anna Barbuscia
Anna Barbuscia is senior researcher at the University of Lausanne and postdoc at INED. She works as part of the collaborative WELLWAYS project, which explores employment-family trajectories and wellbeing in France and Switzerland. Her main research interests are fertility and the consequences of family formation processes for health and well-being. She obtained a PhD in Sociology at the University of Oxford in 2008 and worked as a teaching fellow at the London School of Economics before joining INED.