Women's Marriage Behavior Following a Premarital Birth in Sub‐Saharan Africa

• Author: Emily Smith‐Greenaway,Shelley Clark
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12433
• Published date: 01 February 2018
• Date: 01 February 2018

E S-G University of Southern California

S C McGill University∗

Women’s Marriage Behavior Following a Premarital

Birth in Sub-Saharan Africa

This study examines the relationship between

premarital childbearing and the timing of

women’s entry into their rst marriage in

sub-Saharan Africa. The study shows that

African women who have a premarital birth

generally experience later transitions to mar-

riage than do their childless peers. Although the

birth of a child precipitates a quicker transition

to marriage initially, unmarried mothers, on

average, marry at older ages than their child-

less peers and remain single for between 2 and

14 years. Evidence from a subsample of coun-

tries conrms that the time between having a

child and rst marriage has lengthened slightly

in some countries; however, this reects mainly

the overall trend towa rd later marriage, rathe r

than a further bifurcation of the marital trajec-

tories of mothers versus childless women. The

study raises policy concerns about the welfare

of Africa’s single mothers and their children.

Across several world regions, a growingnumber

of women remain unmarried at the time of their

rst birth (Heuveline, Timberlake, & Fursten-

berg, 2003). Although premarital pregnancies

once resulted in immediate marriage in Western

Department of Sociology, Universityof Southern

California, 851 Downey Way, Hazel & Stanley 314, Los

Angeles, CA 90089 (egs136@gmail.com).

∗3460 McTavish,Montreal, Quebec, H3A 0E6, Canada.

Key Words: Africa, fertility, marriage, premarital

childbearing.

European countries (Kiernan, 2001) and the

United States (England, Wu, & Shafer, 2013;

Gibson-Davis, 2009, 2011; Raley,2001; Seltzer,

2000), women increasingly remain single at the

time of their rst birth and often for several years

thereafter. There is some evidence that these

family formation patterns are becoming more

prevalent in select Latin American (Laplante,

Castro-Martín, Cortina, & Martín-García, 2015)

and Asian (Raymo, Iwasawa, & Bumpass,

2009) countries as well. Far less is known about

unmarried mothers in African countries and

low-income countries more generally (Prince

Cooke & Baxter, 2010).

Evidence from select African countries

suggests that unmarried women’s pregnan-

cies are typically unplanned (Gage, 1998;

Ocholla-Ayayo, Wekesa, & Ottieno, 1993),

and thus women terminate these pregnan-

cies at disproportionately high rates (Sedgh

et al., 2012). Further studies suggest that

unmarried African mothers who continue

the pregnancy, and who do not experience a

spontaneous miscarriage, commonly marry

mid-pregnancy. In fact, childbearing is often a

key element of the elongated marital process

in many African contexts (Meekers, 1992);

a large proportion of premarital pregnancies

thus result in marital births (Meniru, 1995).

This could explain why—despite often high

levels of premarital sex (Mensch, Grant, &

Blanc, 2006) and limited contraceptive access

(Alkema, Kantorova, Menozzi, & Biddle-

com, 2013)—premarital births are uncommon

256 Journal of Marriage and Family 80 (February 2018): 256–270

DOI:10.1111/jomf.12433