Spain's Persistent Negative Educational Gradient in Fertility

The association between the number of pregnancies and depressive symptoms: A population-based study

BACKGROUND

Depression is a psychosomatic disorder that affects reproductive health. The number of pregnancies is an important indicator of reproductive health. Multiple pregnancies and births may aggravate the risk of depression in females. However, the evidence of the connection between the number of pregnancies and depression is unclear. We aimed to investigate the relationship between the number of pregnancies and depressive symptoms.

METHODS

We used the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data with a total of 17,216 women from 2005 to 2020. The number of pregnancies obtained from the self-report questionnaire. Depressive symptoms were measured by the nine-item patient health questionnaire (PHQ-9). Multivariate logistic regression models were used to examine the risk factors of depression. The restricted cubic spline (RCS) was applied to explore the nonlinear relationship. In addition, subgroup analysis was used to support the accuracy of our findings.

RESULTS

We found that the number of pregnancies is positively associated with the prevalence of depression. According to the multivariable logistic regression analysis, pregnant women was 1.52-fold higher than the normal group to experience depression in the fully-adjusted model. No interaction between number of pregnancies and covariates in subgroups.

LIMITATIONS

This study was cross-sectional, which limits its ability to draw conclusions about the causal relationship between the number of pregnancies and depression.

CONCLUSION

In the United States, the number of pregnancies was positively associated with the prevalence of depression. It is critical to register the number of pregnancies for monitoring depressive symptoms.

Perinatal health in Spain during and after the Great Recession: Educational selection into fertility as a protective factor in high unemployment contexts

Higher maternal resources have long been associated with superior birth outcomes. This study analyzes the potentially protective role of maternal educational selection into fertility in adverse macroeconomic contexts. We focus on the case of Spain, a country reaching record-high unemployment levels during the Great Recession starting in 2008. First, we examine whether selection into fertility of more educated mothers took place as province-level unemployment rates rose. Secondly, we assess whether maternal education mitigated the impact of higher unemployment levels on different birth outcomes. The analysis combines register data on the universe of live births with aggregate data on province-level unemployment. We cover the period 2007-2019 to ensure sufficient variability of unemployment rates and perform linear regression and linear probability models with fixed effects to hold constant unobserved heterogeneity across provinces. Findings indicate selection into fertility of mothers with university-level education in times of high unemployment. In addition, while unemployment rates did show an adverse impact on certain birth outcomes -birthweight, the occurrence of low and very low birthweight, and the risk of stillbirth - maternal education mitigated the observed relations. It was itself, moreover, consistently and independently associated with better perinatal health. We thus conclude that fertility selectivity by maternal education cushioned the impact of the adverse economic context derived from the Great Recession through two separate pathways.