THE PREVALENCE AND DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS OF CONSANGUINEOUS MARRIAGES IN PAKISTAN

Consanguineous marriages are strongly preferred in much of West and So uth Asia. This paper examines the prevalence and sociodemographic corr elates of consanguineous unions in Pakistan using local and national d ata. Information from 1011 ever-married women living in four multi-eth nic and multi-lingual squatter settlements of Karachi, the main commer cial centre of the country, are compared with data from the national 1 990/91 Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (PDHS), based on informa tion provided by 6611 women. Both sets of results indicate that approx imately 60% of marriages were consanguineous, over 80% of which were b etween first cousins. The mean coefficients of inbreeding (F) in the p resent generation were 0.0316 and 0.0331 for the Karachi and PDHS data respectively. In both surveys the prevalence of consanguineous unions appeared to be unchanged over the past three to four decades. Consang uineous unions were more common among women who were illiterate or had only primary level education, were first or second generation migrant s from rural areas of Pakistan or, in the PDHS, lived in rural areas, and whose parents were also consanguineously married.