The significance of women's education on contraceptive use

Abstract

In this paper, I aim to explore the mechanisms mediating the relationship between education and

current contraceptive use in effort to stress the importance of women’s education in reducing

fertility. I hypothesize that there are mainly three mechanisms through which women’s education

influence contraceptive use: women’s employment, exposure to family planning messages in the

mass media and husband’s education. Pakistan is the unit of analysis in this paper. To test the

hypothesis, I conduct logistic regression to analyze the data of 9,556 currently married women

that was collected in the Pakistan Demographic and Health survey (PDHS) 2006-07. Results

show that women’s education, exposure to family planning messages in the mass media and

having husbands with higher education significantly predict current contraceptive use among

women, but not women’s employment and having husbands with primary and secondary

education