State of World Population 2012 - UNFPA Haiti

tCommunityeducation inCaracas, Venezuela.©Panos/Dermot TatlowThe health benefits of family planning areparticularly significant for younger women andadolescents. Women ages 15 to 19 are twiceas likely to die from maternal causes as olderwomen as a consequence of their physicalimmaturity and increased risk of obstetric complicationssuch as obstetric fistula (Miller et al.,2005; Raj et al., 2009).By averting early pregnancies, reducing riskypregnancies and reducing the risks of prematuremortality or long-term morbidity, improvedaccess to family planning can extend life spans,increase the time horizons for the returns tohuman capital investments and also enablewomen to reallocate their time towards othereconomic activities. One research study foundthat women in Europe and North America havegone from spending 70 per cent of their adultlives bearing and rearing children before thedemographic transition, to spending about14 per cent of it more recently (Lee, 2003).Impact on schoolingIn Colombia, the drop in fertility induced by theProfamilia family planning programme was associatedwith nearly 0.15 more years of schooling(Miller, 2009). In Sri Lanka, the reduction inmaternal mortality risk between 1946 and 1953increased female life expectancy by 1.5 years(approximately 4 per cent), and this increasedfemale literacy among the affected cohorts by 2.5per cent (one percentage point) and increasedyears of schooling by 4 per cent (0.17 years)(Jayachandran and Lleras-Muney, 2009).The trade-off between schooling and childbearingis particularly important for adolescents,since childbearing can disrupt education andpreparation for the labour force. The relationshipTHE STATE OF WORLD POPULATION 201273