Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T05:17:40.481Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Maternal mortality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2010

Get access

Summary

Calculation of adult mortality from family reconstitution data is problematic because of the difficulty of determining with any precision, for those individuals for whom a death date is unknown, the period during which they are present in observation and hence at risk of dying. In the special case of maternal mortality, provided it is defined as the risk of dying during or shortly after confinement and is expressed as a rate relative to the number of confinements, this problem is essentially absent. The beginning of the period of risk is clearly defined by the birth of a child and ends, according to different definitions, within a few weeks or months following confinement. Since it is unlikely that many women migrate out of a village shortly after giving birth, and that those few who do are unlikely to have died in some other village within the specified period, women for whom no death date is known can be safely assumed to have survived the critical period after confinement.

Issues of measurement and definition

In measuring maternal mortality from reconstituted family histories, there are special problems that are essentially inherent to the parish register sources on which these histories are typically based. The most important one is the fact that maternal mortality may be associated with miscarriages and undelivered pregnancies, which are often not recorded at all, or with stillbirths, which are less than fully recorded in the registers (see Appendix B).

Type
Chapter
Information
Demographic Behavior in the Past
A Study of Fourteen German Village Populations in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
, pp. 102 - 116
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1988

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Maternal mortality
  • John E. Knodel
  • Book: Demographic Behavior in the Past
  • Online publication: 04 August 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511523403.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Maternal mortality
  • John E. Knodel
  • Book: Demographic Behavior in the Past
  • Online publication: 04 August 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511523403.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Maternal mortality
  • John E. Knodel
  • Book: Demographic Behavior in the Past
  • Online publication: 04 August 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511523403.005
Available formats
×