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Investigating the Association between Infant Mortality and Multiple Births: Evidence from Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey

Infants play vital roles for a nation’s present and future progress. Hence ensuring their healthy growth and development should be the main concern of any country. Infant mortality remains unacceptable and disproportionally larger in the multiple birth groups in many developing countries like Bangladesh. This study made an attempt to investigate the association between children of multiple births and infant survival employing multivariate survival regression model with Weibull hazard function. Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey, 2014 data are used for this purpose where information of 4426 childbirth are used. The estimation results suggest that child born as a multiple births are about five times more likely to die within infancy period than the child born as a singleton (HR=5.25; 95% CI: 2.91, 9.06). The association does not have any significant change on the direction and strength when child’s gender, order of the birth, taking antenatal care, skilled delivery assistant, maternal age at birth, BMI, educational status, wealth status index, type of place of residence and geographic division are controlled (HR=5.08; 95%; CI: 2.55, 9.26). This study suggests that children of multiple births have a strong negative association with infant survival which is independent of different other factors. Thus health related logistic supports are necessary for the multiple births to improve the infant survival in Bangladesh.