Education and Nonuse of Contraceptives Among Poor Women in Chiapas, Mexico

The influence of poverty and illiteracy on womens decision to use contraception was surveyed among 883 Mexican women in 1994. Multivariate logistic regression analyses were conducted for the sample as a whole and for individual age groups in order to identify the relationship between socioeconomic variables and the probability that a woman had never used contraception. In the multivariate analysis lack of education independently predicted non-use of contraceptives: illiterate women were 1.6 times more likely to have never used contraception than were women who had attended secondary school. Other socioeconomic variables associated with a high tendency toward nonuse were having given birth at home having experienced the death of at least two children and not having a paid job at the time of the survey. Among younger women though socioeconomic variables other than school attendance were more significant in explaining non- use. The study concludes that although the increased availability of family planning services in the Border Region of Chiapas over the last 20 years has regulated the direct effect of schooling on contraceptive practice lack of education remains an important predictor of non-use of contraceptives among the women in this region.