Impact of family law reform on adolescent reproductive health in Ethiopia: A quasi‑experimental study

Summary & Objectives

The study set out to estimate the causal impact of Ethiopia’s 2000 Revised Family Code, which raised the minimum legal age of marriage to 18 and strengthened women’s marital rights on adolescent reproductive health. It aimed to assess whether the reform reduced adolescent births, child marriage and early sexual initiation, and to determine whether effects differed between rural and urban areas. It also examined whether the law affected pregnancy termination, contraceptive needs and newborn and infant mortality

Findings

The reform led to a marked and sustained decline in adolescent childbearing, with exposed cohorts experiencing a 6–9 percentage-point reduction in births before age 18. The law also reduced child marriage and early sexual initiation, demonstrating that a strengthened legal framework can shift behaviours even in settings with longstanding marriage norms. Effects were similar in both rural and urban areas, suggesting broad population-level influence.

The study did not find evidence of changes in pregnancy termination, unmet need for contraception or neonatal and infant mortality, in part because mortality outcomes were influenced by many other factors and data were more variable. Overall, the results show that legal empowerment, particularly removing marriage exceptions, expanding women’s rights to work and property and improving access to justice, can meaningfully reduce early marriage and early childbearing when combined with an enabling social environment where advocacy and information campaigns reinforce the law.

Recommendations

The study recommends that governments adopt and enforce strong, exception-free minimum age-of-marriage laws and ensure these reforms are accompanied by efforts that enhance women’s bargaining power within households, expand girls’ educational and economic opportunities and mobilise communities to shift norms. It calls for integrating legal reforms with programmes that engage parents, leaders and adolescents, and for sustained dissemination of information about girls’ rights so that communities support the law. The findings highlight the importance of pairing legal change with investments in health and social systems, and they emphasise the need for continued monitoring, enforcement and complementary interventions to accelerate reductions in child marriage and improve adolescent reproductive health.