ArticleStudies in family planning2024
Assessing Trends in the Desire to Avoid Pregnancy: A Cautionary Note.
Article in Studies in family planning, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Contraception and unintended pregnancy: explaining the unexpected relationship in Sub-Saharan Africa using demographic and health survey data.BMJ public health · 2026Article
- Predictors of Desire to Avoid Pregnancy: The Roles of Marital Satisfaction and Fear of Childbirth.BMC women's health · 2025Article
- Fertility Desires and Contraceptive Transition.Population and development review · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The desire to avoid pregnancy-to delay the next birth or have no further births-is a fundamental sexual and reproductive health indicator. We show that two readily available measures-prospective fertility preferences and the demand for contraception [Demand] construct-provide substantially different portraits of historical trends. They also yield correspondingly different assessments of the sources of contraceptive change. We argue, with supporting empirical evidence, that Demand enormously overstates the historical trend in the desire to avoid pregnancy because Demand as currently constructed is in part a function of contraceptive prevalence. This makes for "reverse causality" in decompositions of contraceptive change, producing an upward distortion on the order of 25 percentage points in the amount of contraceptive change attributed to a change in fertility desires. Decomposition of contraception change free of the distortion reveals that contraceptive change has been due almost entirely to more complete implementation of fertility preferences. This is explained in part by the surprisingly slight historical change in preferences, a fact we document and then show is a consequence of a historical shift in parity composition toward lower parities.
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Registered trials
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