Every woman of childbearing age in the sample was asked about her maternity history. In particular, the questions addressed the outcome and the completion time of each pregnancy, the gender of live births, the number of months of pure breastfeeding for each child and the health condition of each live birth at the time of the survey. Unfortunately, women were not asked about the health condition of each child at birth. In the present paper, we restrict our analysis to the youngest child born to each woman of childbearing age. 5 There are three main reasons for doing this. First, we are interested in examining the effect of health.
