Stopping Too Late: Education Differentials in Unmet Need in India

Sowmya Rajan, Duke University

This paper explores the influence of women’s education on having a particular category of unmet need (unmet need for spacing and stopping, met need for spacing and stopping, no need). Women’s education is one of the most well-established factors linked to fertility. Although we have evidence on the connections between women’s education and her fertility behavior and outcomes, we know much less about how women’s education influences unmet need. This paper attempts to fill that gap by studying education differentials in unmet need over time in India. We use data from the National Family Health Surveys to decompose total unmet need into its components of met and unmet need for spacing and stopping respectively. Preliminary analyses suggest a strong educational gradient in unmet need for spacing and stopping. The complete paper will assess this relationship using multivariate analyses, explore some of the reasons thereof, and consequences of these differentials.