Choi Jin Young, Lee Sang-Hyop
University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2006 Jul;63(1):107-17. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2005.11.063. Epub 2006 Jan 27.
Prenatal care appears to serve as a trigger in increasing the chances for access to subsequent health care services. Although several previous studies have investigated this connection, none have focused specifically on how parents' behavior differs before and after learning the gender of their babies. Investigating parents' behavioral changes after the child's birth provides a quasi-natural experiment with which to test the gender discrimination hypothesis. This issue was examined here, using a rich family health survey data set from India. We find evidence for the triggering effect of prenatal care on immunization only among rural boys, but we find no compelling evidence for this effect among other sub-samples. This finding suggests two things, which are not mutually exclusive. One is that the information spillover from prenatal care has a much larger impact in rural areas, where alternative sources of information are scarce, compared with urban areas. The other is that the sex of a child is a critical factor in producing different levels of health care behavior in rural areas, where sons are favored and more valued than in urban areas.
产前护理似乎是增加获得后续医疗服务机会的一个触发因素。尽管此前已有多项研究探讨了这种联系，但没有一项研究专门关注父母在得知胎儿性别前后的行为差异。研究孩子出生后父母的行为变化提供了一个准自然实验，用以检验性别歧视假说。本文利用来自印度的丰富家庭健康调查数据集对这一问题进行了研究。我们发现，仅在农村男孩中存在产前护理对免疫接种的触发效应的证据，但在其他子样本中未发现这一效应的有力证据。这一发现表明了两点，二者并非相互排斥。一是与城市地区相比，在信息来源较少的农村地区，产前护理的信息溢出影响更大。另一点是，在农村地区，孩子的性别是导致医疗保健行为水平差异的关键因素，农村地区男孩比女孩更受青睐和重视。
