Women's empowerment and reproductive choices.

Abstract

The authors use data from the 1990-1991 Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey to examine some variables indicating women's empowerment and to analyze the impact of such variables on reproductive choices. They conclude that "most Pakistani women are unaccustomed to the idea of planning children; for them, having children is a phenomenon as simple and common as most other issues of life. Among others who desire a specific number of children, the majority end up having more. It is because socio-cultural influences lead women to have a large family size. Our analysis also denotes similar results, and hence most of the empowerment variables used in this analysis do not explain the variation in the dependent variable as was expected." A comment by Khaleda Manzoor (pp.1,148-50) is included.