Health Repercussions of Child Marriage on Middle-Eastern Mothers and Their Children

Although the MENA region hosts around 24 percentages of the global incidences of child marriage, empirical evidence examining the health and demographic outcome of child marriage for local women is rather rare or absent. The prevalence rate of this phenomenon may be subject to expansion due to the on-going conflicts and political fluxes across many countries in the region. This study investigates the impact of child marriage on the health outcome for mothers and their children in three developing MENA countries, Egypt, Sudan, and Palestine. This study uses the recent version of each country‟s UNICEF-MICS household survey to run a multivariate regression analysis across three clustering levels. Our model uses three children health outcomes: stunting, wasting and mortality rate and two women health outcomes: having children who later die and the recipient of antenatal care. These variables are selected based on their availability across countries. Our estimations are also adjusted for a set of socioeconomic and demographic indicators of interviewed women, such as maternal age, maternal literacy, child weight at birth, wealth index, parental polygyny, and living area, the extent of awareness and exposure to information via acquiring radio and television. More than half of the interviewed women across Egypt and Sudan have been married before reaching the age of 18 while nearly 46% of the Palestinian women have been married early. Our empirical results postulate that child marriage is generally associated with more vulnerable health outcomes across the three countries. Wherein, women who were married before reaching 18 in Egypt are more likely than women who were elderly married to have stunted and wasted children. A similar finding regarding stunting rate is found in the case of Palestine. Also, child marriage is associated with higher under-five children mortality relative in the three countries. Regarding women health indicators, early married women are more likely to have children who later die than the other women group across all the countries. Finally, early married women are less likely to receive antenatal care in the three countries.