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This article examines the determinants of contraceptive and abortion behavior and how each of these influences the other, with an emphasis on the role of women's life‐course stage and experience. We base our approach on life‐course theory, which argues that behavior is influenced by current circumstances as well as experiences over the life course. We use data collected for every pregnancy experienced by 2,444 women in Madhya Pradesh, India, to explore use of temporary contraceptive methods (both modern and traditional) and sterilization, as well as abortion attempts. We use logistic regression to model whether women took these actions in a given pregnancy interval, including past experience with contraception in the abortion analyses and with abortion in the contraceptive analyses. The results suggest that life‐course factors play a role in shaping behavior. Moreover, past use of contraceptives has a significant effect on attempted abortion and vice versa. Finally, we find that this relationship changes as women age and accumulate experience.

SummaryThis article examines how the sex composition of women's current children at the start of a pregnancy interval influences both fertility desires and the full range of reproductive actions women may take to realize them, including temporary contraception, abortion and sterilization, in Madhya Pradesh, India, where popular notions of ideal family size and sex composition are dominated by son preference. The analysis is conducted using a dataset of 9127 individual pregnancy intervals from a 2002 statewide representative survey of 2444 women aged 15–39 with at least one child. The results indicate that women's preferences go beyond a singular preference for male children, with the preferred composition of children being two boys and one girl. Women with this composition are 90% less likely to report having wanted another pregnancy (OR 0.097, p<0.01) relative to those with two girls. These preferences have significant implications for reproductive actions. While sex composition has no statistically significant effect on the use of temporary contraception, those with the preferred sex composition are twice as likely to attempt abortion (OR 2.436, p<0.01) and twelve times more likely to be sterilized (OR 12.297, p<0.01) relative to those with two girls only.