PubMed · 11628876
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P N Utrilla. 1982. [Not Available].. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11628876/
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In this paper, I explore how children's health influences the wages and work hours of their mother. Some children have illnesses that require expensive medicine or treatment, but demand little parental time. Others require extraordinary amounts of time; and still others require care at unpredictable times of the day. I construct a theoretical model of mother's labor supply that explicitly incorporates the financial and time costs associated with the presence of unhealthy children. The model predicts that children with time-intensive illnesses and those with unpredictable illnesses negatively influence mother's labor supply, whereas children with illnesses with a strong financial component have a positive effect on mother's labor supply. In order to empirically test this, I organize a focus group of doctors to categorize illnesses and disabilities by the type of resources they require. Using the 1997 PSID Child Development Supplement, I estimate the effects of these requirements on mother's decision to work and work hours. After controlling for the financial burden of the illness, single mothers work fewer hours if their child has a time-intensive illness and married mothers are less likely to work and work fewer hours if their child has a severe condition with an unpredictable time component. These findings are consistent with the theoretical model and highlight the need to decompose the effects of child health on mother's work status. Model specifications that aggregate across illnesses are incapable of disentangling these effects and may therefore underestimate the welfare costs of having a sick child in the family.
BACKGROUND: Immunization programmes are ethically defensible and society has a significant role to play in providing vaccination against measles and safeguarding herd immunity to optimize its individuals' capabilities. Since preventive actions interfere with individuals who consider themselves as healthy, public health strategies - as distinct from advice in a clinical consultation - require something approaching certainty as to benefits and possible side effects of an intervention. The principle of individual autonomy, a fundamental value in bioethics, often makes discussions covering ethical issues in public health interventions difficult and non-productive as to practical solutions. In encounters intended to provide information on vaccination, discussions regarding risks tend to simplify the issue into an individual one: either the child gets measles or not, or is affected by side effects or not. METHOD AND CONCLUSIONS: A model is suggested for identification and analysis of the ethical conflicts in measles vaccination programmes, which contains two different dimensions: the affected persons and the relevant ethical principles. Justice as solidarity, not utility, should be paired with autonomy in ethical deliberations on preventive health interventions such as a vaccination programme for measles. If the goal is solidarity rather than conformity, the parents must be free to decide what they think is right, because that is what moral responsibility is all about. Solidarity, however, could never be accepted as an argument without parents trusting the messages from the health institutions and availability of reasonable societal support for those who claim an association between vaccinations and possible side effects.