State of World Population 2012 - Country Page List - UNFPA

t
Community
education in
Caracas, Venezuela.
©Panos/Dermot Tatlow
The health benefits of family planning are
particularly significant for younger women and
adolescents. Women ages 15 to 19 are twice
as likely to die from maternal causes as older
women as a consequence of their physical
immaturity and increased risk of obstetric complications
such as obstetric fistula (Miller et al.,
2005; Raj et al., 2009).
By averting early pregnancies, reducing risky
pregnancies and reducing the risks of premature
mortality or long-term morbidity, improved
access to family planning can extend life spans,
increase the time horizons for the returns to
human capital investments and also enable
women to reallocate their time towards other
economic activities. One research study found
that women in Europe and North America have
gone from spending 70 per cent of their adult
lives bearing and rearing children before the
demographic transition, to spending about
14 per cent of it more recently (Lee, 2003).
Impact on schooling
In Colombia, the drop in fertility induced by the
Profamilia family planning programme was associated
with nearly 0.15 more years of schooling
(Miller, 2009). In Sri Lanka, the reduction in
maternal mortality risk between 1946 and 1953
increased female life expectancy by 1.5 years
(approximately 4 per cent), and this increased
female literacy among the affected cohorts by 2.5
per cent (one percentage point) and increased
years of schooling by 4 per cent (0.17 years)
(Jayachandran and Lleras-Muney, 2009).
The trade-off between schooling and childbearing
is particularly important for adolescents,
since childbearing can disrupt education and
preparation for the labour force. The relationship
THE STATE OF WORLD POPULATION 2012
73