Evidence that, in India, girls get less mother’s milk than boys, leading to higher infant mortality among girls (leaving me confused about whether this is explaining 14% or most of the differences observed in data)

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Chris Blattman reports on a study by Seema Jayachandran and Ilyana Kuziemko that makes the following argument:

Medical research indicates that breastfeeding suppresses post-natal fertility. We [Jayachandran and Kuziemko] model the implications for breastfeeding decisions and test the model’s predictions using survey data from India. . . . mothers with no or few sons want to conceive again and thus limit their breastfeeding. . . . Because breastfeeding protects against water- and food-borne disease, our model also makes predictions regarding health outcomes. We find that child-mortality patterns mirror those of breastfeeding with respect to gender and its interactions with birth order and ideal family size. Our results suggest that the gender gap in breastfeeding explains 14 percent of excess female child mortality in India, or about 22,000 “missing girls” each year.

Interesting. I wonder what Monica Das Gupta would say about this study–she seems to be the expert in this area.

Huh?

The only thing that really puzzles me about Jayachandran and Kuziemko’s article is that, on one hand, they produce an estimate of 14%, but on the other, they write:

In contrast to conventional explanations, excess female mortality due to differential breastfeeding is largely an unintended consequence of parents’ desire to have more sons rather than an explicit decision to allocate fewer resources to daughters.

But they just said their explanation only explains 14%. Doesn’t that suggest that the other 86% arises from infanticide and other “explicit decisions”? The difference between “14%” and “largely” is so big that I think I must be missing something here. Perhaps someone can explain? Thanks.

4 thoughts on “Evidence that, in India, girls get less mother’s milk than boys, leading to higher infant mortality among girls (leaving me confused about whether this is explaining 14% or most of the differences observed in data)”

  1. That second line is only talking about deaths "due to differential breastfeeding." So they're only calling this 14% an "unintended consequence" and not the other 86%.

  2. 'In contrast to conventional explanations, excess female mortality due to differential breastfeeding is largely an unintended consequence of parents' desire to have more sons rather than an explicit decision to allocate fewer resources to daughters.' — I would think that allocating fewer resources to daughters is explicitly related to the parents' desire to have boys ?

    So if I get this right, parents don't do X not because they don't want to do X but because they'd rather do Y ? — I guess I can see the logic there, as convoluted as it is.

  3. aram's right. But I can't imagine how they might deal with reverse causality here. You would think that mothers who breadfeed and mothers who don't may have other systematic differences in parenting.

  4. Breastfeeding delays the resumption of menses -thats how fertility is affected. The preference for breastfeeding sons is not a universal finding as I have found the opposite in some UK data. Female colleagues assure me that this is because male infants are hungrier so one can't rely as much on breastmilk. But this is just anecdotal.
    There is a small literature dealing with reverse causality/endogeneity and breastfeeding.

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