# **C. Mortality, fertility and migration**

The full effect of violence can be underestimated if the shock increases fetal deaths (survival selection). Using the DHS’s pregnancy calendar, it is possible to distinguish between live births and terminations<sup>49</sup> and analyze the effect on this outcome. Despite known difficulties in capturing information about fetal mortality, we do not expect this problem to be more pronounced in Colombia than elsewhere, especially poorer countries where more births and deaths occur outside of the health system. Only pregnancies within five years from the survey are used, a standard procedure used to alleviate recall error. The models are estimated as in Equation 1 but without controlling for gender, multiple birth and skilled delivery, as this information is not available for non-live births.<sup>50</sup> Because terminations tend to happen early in the pregnancy,<sup>51</sup> I interact the indicators of exposure to violence in the second and third trimesters with a dummy for whether the pregnancy reached those trimesters, and check the results with the alternative method of using the expected full-length trimesters. Because the number of cases per woman is much larger than for live births, I can further estimate a mother fixed-effects model.

There are 39,500 thousand pregnancies from non-migrant women, of which 18% do not end in a live birth. Compared to the live births sample, exposure to violence here is lower, with 2.5% of pregnancies exposed during gestation. The share of live births among exposed pregnancies is not significantly lower compared with those that were not exposed (91.3% vs 81.9%). The regression results, where this relationship between violence and the outcome of the pregnancy (terminated or live birth) is examined are in Table 7 (columns 1-5). Overall, there is not a significant effect of a shock in the first trimester on the likelihood of a terminated pregnancy, neither in the base specifications (columns 1 and 2), the mother fixed-effects (column 3), nor the alternative trimester determination method (columns 4 and 5). Exposure to violence later in the pregnancy, especially in the second trimester, may reduce the likelihood of a termination, but this result is statistically weak and not always significant.

Since only boys’ birthweights were negatively affected by violence shocks in early-pregnancy, it is possible that fetal mortality is also gender selective. This cannot be directly verified because the gender of the fetus is not specified in the data, but I use instead the gender ratio at birth in the sample of live births as a signal for changes in gender specific terminations (Table 7 columns 6 and 7 ) (as in Sanders and Stoecker (2015) and Valente (2015)). Although the 1 coefficient is negative, it is not significant enough to support the hypothesis of a boy-specific mortality rise. δδ

# [Table 7 here]

A second source of selection bias can occur if violence triggers fertility changes. For example, if more educated people reacted differently to the shock, the sample of births could have worse health because of this compositional change on who becomes a parent and not because of exposure to

> 49 A full pregnancy history distinguishing miscarriage from stillbirths, abortions and ectopic pregnancies is only available in the latest round of the survey.

> 50 Since the day of the pregnancy end is not known in the calendar data, the date of conception is not adjusted for the time of the month and thus can be subject to greater measurement error than the date of conception of the live births sample.

> 51 In the sample, terminated pregnancies last 2.4 months on average, 91.3% of pregnancies that reach the seventh month are live births, and 99.6% at the ninth month.

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