Fertility and Frailty : Demographic Change and Health and Status of Indian Women

Abstract

It is now common practice to infer the social status of women from their demographic characteristics. Yet it is not so easy to read through demographic progress, in terms of declines in mortality and fertility, to make unambiguous judgments about trends in women's social standing. This paper investigates some of the issues involved in the context of maternal mortality, an important but as yet relatively neglected component of female mortality. Declines in maternal mortality may occur in the absence of any change in women's relative social standing or health status simply as the mechanical counterpart of fertility decline. This paper attempts to distinguish the comparative contributions of fertility decline and relative status improvement to trends in maternal mortality in India.