School Attendance and Adolescent Fertility in Central America

Paul Stupp, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Danielle B. Jackson, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

This paper examines interrelationships between school attendance and adolescent fertility, using recent survey datasets from Honduras (2001), Guatemala (2002) and El Salvador (2002/03). It presents an overview of trends in adolescent fertility, ages at first birth, first sexual intercourse and first union; highest grade level completed and age at school completion by considering successive cohorts of women. It then presents a series of multivariate models of school completion as a risk factor for starting fertility and of pregnancy as a risk factor for dropping out of school. The analysis is stratified by wealth quintiles of the population, as it is expected that these relationships vary by socioeconomic status.