What are the circumstances of child marriage? How will our hormones react
Answers
We describe the adverse health consequences to mothers and to their offspring of an early age at marriage and of childbearing, which include malnutrition and high rates of morbidity and mortality.In South Asia, unlike many other parts of the world, marriage is still the main context for sexual intercourse. Getting married therefore signals the start of exposure to the chance of becoming pregnant and the earlier a woman gets married, the longer she will spend exposed during her fertile years. Studies find that in the absence of modern contraception, the age at which women marry is the main determinant of the number of children each woman will have (31). Marriage age also plays a very important role in lowering fertility levels from the biological maximum. The availability of reliable contraception offers the chance to thwart this relationship by stopping at a particular desired number of children or by increasing the spacing between births. However, simulations have shown that women who marry young still have more children at the end of their reproductive careers because there is more time for them to increase their desired numbers of births and more opportunity for contraceptive failure to increase fertility (32).