The relationship between intimate partner violence and perinatal mortality: A spatial analysis of Portuguese data

• In Event: Poster Session 2

Abstract

Battered women are more likely to experience unwanted pregnancies/fetal deaths (Bramhankar & Reshmi, 2021), birth complications (Avanigadda & Kulasekaran, 2021), and delivering neonates with low birth weight (Lin et al., 2022; Kpordoxah et al., 2024). For at-risk women, pregnancy is a risk for intimate partner violence (IPV) (Girardi, 2023). At the neighborhood-level, low collective efficacy predicted rates of violence and low birth weight (e.g. Sampson, 2003). Studies on this topic are mostly retrospective and based on individual-level data. The present study sought to investigate spatial-temporal associations between IPV and reproductive health at the municipality-level in 2017 (T1) and 2018 (T2). Visual mapping and spatial statistics were employed to test whether IPV rates predicted later perinatal mortality, adjusting for important covariates. Data from Portugal were analyzed, which included N = 297 municipalities. A global spatial association was found between T1 IPV and T2 perinatal deaths (I = .09, p < .001). Municipalities accounting for this relationship were located in the urban areas of Porto and Lisbon, where T1 IPV was associated with T2 perinatal deaths. However, in global spatial analysis, once previous perinatal mortality rates and SES were added to the model, T1 IPV rates were unrelated to T2 perinatal mortality.

Author

• Tiago Alexandre Lobo-Dos-Santos, University of Kentucky