The Effect of Birth Spacing on Infant and Child Mortality

2 dominant findings have emerged from this detailed analysis of the impact of birth spacing on infant and child mortality in Egypt using 1980 Egyptian Fertility Survey data. The 1st concerns the effect of the length of the immediate preceding birth interval. Children born after long intervals of 4 or more years are much less likely to die in infancy and childhood than children born after shorter intervals. The shorter the preceding interval the greater becomes the risk of dying. The adverse effect of a short interval is strong in the 1st month of life but is even more pronounced at the post-neonatal stage in the 2nd year of life and between the ages of 2 and 5 years. Excluding 1st births and after taking into account the confounding fact that the survivorship of siblings is correlated the results can be summarized in terms of the percentage of children who die before the age of 5 years according to the length of birth interval. For birth intervals of less than 2 years 30.1% of the children die before the age of 5. For intervals of 2 years the percentage becomes 17.7 for intervals of 3 years the percentage is 12.4 and for intervals of more than 4 years only 8.6% die before their 5th birthday. This striking relationship persists regardless of the socioeconomic status of the family the region of residence the birth order of sex of the child or maternal age. If more prolonged spacing of births could be achieved presumably through a better delivery of postpartum family planning services this could entail not only a reduction in fertility but a substantial reduction in mortality as well.