Birth spacing and fertility limitation: a behavioral analysis of a nineteenth century frontier population

Our analysis of changing birth interval distributions over the course of a fertility transition from natural to controlled fertility has examined three closely related propositions. First, within both natural fertility populations (identified at the aggregate level) and cohorts following the onset of fertility limitation, we hypothesized that substantial groups of women with long birth intervals across the individually specified childbearing careers could be identified. That is, even during periods when fertility behavior at the aggregate level is consistent with a natural fertility regime, birth intervals at all parities are inversely related to completed family size. Our tabular analysis enables us to conclude that birth spacing patterns are parity dependent; there is stability in CEB-parity specific mean and birth interval variance over the entire transition. Our evidence does not suggest that the early group of women limiting and spacing births was marked by infecundity. Secondly, the transition appears to be associated with an increasingly larger proportion of women shifting to the same spacing schedules associated with smaller families in earlier cohorts. Thirdly, variations in birth spacing by age of marriage indicate that changes in birth intervals over time are at least indirectly associated with age of marriage, indicating an additional compositional effect. The evidence we have presented on spacing behavior does not negate the argument that parity-dependent stopping behavior was a powerful factor in the fertility transition. Our data also provide evidence of attempts to truncate childbearing. Specifically, the smaller the completed family size, the longer the ultimate birth interval; and ultimate birth intervals increase across cohorts controlling CEB and parity. But spacing appears to represent an additional strategy of fertility limitation. Thus, it may be necessary to distinguish spacing and stopping behavior if one wishes to clarify behavioral patterns within a population (Edlefsen, 1981; Friedlander et al., 1980; Rodriguez and Hobcraft, 1980). Because fertility transition theories imply increased attempts to limit family sizes, it is important to examine differential behavior within subgroups achieving different family sizes. It is this level of analysis which we have attempted to achieve in utilizing parity-specific birth intervals controlled by children ever born.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

Fertility in black Africa

The number of children per woman is between 6 and 7 children in Black Africa. Infertility and poor fertility existing in certain regions of Africa only appear in results concerning central Africa. 6-10% of births occur in women between the ages of 40 and 50. It must be noted that the goal of the majority of societies in Black Africa is to have numerous descendants. Factors of fertility in Africa examined are: precocious marriage, a long period of exposure to the risk of pregnancy, birth spacing and pathological infertility. The paper also discusses modern contraception and birth control, the improvement of sanitation conditions as part of the battle against infertility and infant mortality, combating infertility, decreasing infant mortality and governmental attitudes toward fertility control. Despite the efforts of several private and governmental agencies to promote family planning, progress in Africa has been modest. In the majority of Black African countries, women do not have access to contraception. In rural areas, the absence of an administrative infrastructure prevents diffusion of information and access to contraception. Improving general health conditions has 2 consequences on fertility: it reduces infertility due to diseases that cause sterility and it reduces infant mortality which affects birth intervals. So far birth control has only been successful among the very educated women. However, a great potential for more users exists.     

Modelling period fertility: Schooling and intervals following a birth in Eastern Africa

We describe a regression-based approach to the modelling of age-, order-, and duration-specific period fertility, using retrospective survey data. The approach produces results that are free of selection biases and can be used to study differential fertility. It is applied to Demographic and Health Survey data for Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe to investigate differential trends in fertility by education. Parity progression fell and the intervals following each birth lengthened between the 1970s and 2000s in all four countries. Fertility fell most among women with secondary education. In contrast to other world regions, postponement of successive births for extended periods accounted for much of the initial drop in fertility in these African countries. However, family size limitation by women with secondary education in Ethiopia and Kenya and longer birth spacing in Zimbabwe also played significant roles. Thus, birth control is being adopted in Eastern Africa in response to diverse changes in fertility preferences.     

Recent changes in Negro fertility

Crude birth rates for the Negro population of the United States indicate that fertility declined while Negroes remained in the South and them climbed in the last twenty-five years as Negroes became urbanized. Cohort rates show more precisely the effects of the Depression upon childbearing as well as the magnitude and persistence of the post-Depression rise in fertility. More Negro women now become mothers, average family size has increased, and the proportion of women bearing six, seven, or eight children has risen. Negro fertility has risen despite the urbanization of Negroes and improvements in their socio-economic characteristics. Negro fertility rates present the paradox of falling when demographic transition theory would predict the maintenance of high rates and then rising when a decline would be expected. Urbanization does not appear to have reduced Negro fertility. Traditionally, urban living has dampened childbearing in two ways—first, health conditions in cities were inferior to those of rural areas, and thus urbanization affected fecundity adversely; second, city residents are more likely to know about and adopt birth control than rural residents. Negroes migrated to cities at the very time when diseases were being controlled and when public health and welfare facilities were being expanded to serve all residents. This has contributed to higher Negro fertility rates. If fertility rates are to fall because of family planning, not only must birth control be available but there must be a desire to limit family size. Such a desire may be linked to opportunities for social mobility. Negroes have not been assimilated into urban society as previous in-migrant groups were, and opportunities for mobility have been restricted. For these reasons Negroes may be slow to adopt stable monogamous families and the intentional control of fertility.     

Deliberate birth spacing before the fertility transition in Europe: evidence from nineteenth-century Belgium

Many scholars have argued that deliberate birth spacing may have played a role before and during the modern fertility transition. There are good historical and theoretical reasons for this view, but it has proved to be hard to demonstrate convincingly that birth intervals were in fact partly determined by attempts at deliberate fertility control. This paper suggests a method of securing evidence on the issue for married couples. The method is applied to three cohorts living in a Belgian town in the nineteenth century. The findings indicate that, even before the fertility transition, couples in the working class were controlling their fertility by deliberate spacing.     

Below-repiacement fertility in Tropical Africa? Some evidence from Addis Ababa

In the past few years there has been a gradual but progressive shift away from the long held scepticism about the prospect of reproductive change in Tropical Africa. Consequendy, the question is now not so much whether Tropical Africa remains a spectator of fertility transition, but whether and how soon fertility in the region will decline to level attained in other parts of the world. Using data from a series of censuses and surveys conducted in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, a country which itself has high fertility, this study explores emerging evidence of fertility levels below two children per woman in an African city. Postponement of marriage and increased incidence of non-marriage, as well as a decline in marital fertility recorded across all birth orders and all age group, are the routes by which the observed transition to below-replacement fertility has been achieved. The paper outlines some tentative institutional and cultural factors that may have contributed to these changes. Revised version of an essay awarded the W.D. Borrie prize (postgraduate section), 1998.     

Duration of Marriage,Fertility and Women's Employment Opportunities in England and Wales in 1911

Data from the 1911 Census of England and Wales are examined for evidence of family limitation early in marriage. It is shown that a substantial number of couples used birth control for ‘spacing’ as well as for ‘stopping’ fertility. Moreover ‘spacing’ of births appears to have been more widespread in districts in which women's employment opportunities were relatively good. In general, the results obtained do not fit with the Princeton view of the European fertility transition with its stress on parity-specific family limitation spreading in response to improvements in contraceptive information and technology.     

Intensive Parenting: Fertility and Breastfeeding Duration in the United States

Using 30 years of longitudinal data from a nationally representative cohort of women, we study the association between breastfeeding duration and completed fertility, fertility expectations, and birth spacing. We find that women who breastfeed their first child for five months or longer are a distinct group. They have more children overall and higher odds of having three or more children rather than two, compared with women who breastfeed for shorter durations or not at all. Expected fertility is associated with initiating breastfeeding but not with how long mothers breastfeed. Thus, women who breastfeed longer do not differ significantly from other breastfeeding women in their early fertility expectations. Rather, across the life course, these women achieve and even exceed their earlier fertility expectations. Women who breastfeed for shorter durations (1–21 weeks) are more likely to fall short of their expected fertility than to achieve or exceed their expectations, and they are significantly less likely than women who breastfeed for longer durations (≥22 weeks) to exceed their expected fertility. In contrast, women who breastfeed longer are as likely to exceed as to achieve their earlier expectations, and the difference between their probability of falling short versus exceeding their fertility expectations is relatively small and at the boundary of statistical significance (p = .096). These differences in fertility are not explained by differences in personal and family resources, including family income or labor market attachment. Our findings suggest that breastfeeding duration may serve as a proxy for identifying a distinct approach to parenting. Women who breastfeed longer have reproductive patterns quite different than their socioeconomic position would predict. They both have more children and invest more time in those children.     

The Correspondence Between Fertility Intentions and Behavior in the United States

Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we describe the correspondence between intended family size and observed fertility for US men and women in the 1957–64 birth cohorts. Mean fertility intentions calculated from reports given in the mid‐20s modestly overstate completed fertility. But discrepancies between stated intent and actual fertility are common—the stated intent at age 24 (for both women and men) is more likely to miss than to match completed fertility. We focus on factors that predict which women and men will have fewer or more children than intended. Consistent with life‐course arguments, those unmarried, childless, or (for women) still in school at approximately age 24 were most likely to underachieve their intended parity (i.e., had fewer children than intended at age 24). We discuss how such discrepancies between intentions and behavior may cumulate to produce sizable cross‐group fertility differences.     

Second Births and the Second Shift: A Research Note on Gender Equity and Fertility

In a set of propositions on fertility transition, Peter McDonald recently proposed that the decline from replacement‐level fertility to low fertility is associated with a combination of high levels of gender equity in individual‐oriented institutions, such as education and market employment, and low levels of gender equity in the family and family‐oriented institutions. Similarly, the “second shift,” or the share of domestic work performed by formally employed women, forms a critical piece of current cross‐national explanations for low fertility. Building on this scholarship, the authors explore whether there is empirical evidence at the individual level for a relationship between gender equity at home, as indicated by the division of housework among working couples with one child, and the transition to a second birth. Results, based on a sample of US couples, indicate a U‐shaped relationship between gender equity and fertility. Both the most modern and the most traditional housework arrangements are positively associated with fertility. This empirical test elaborates the family‐fertility relationship and underscores the need to incorporate family context, including gender equity, into explanations for fertility change.     

Family planning practice and women's fertility decision-making power

This paper investigates the effects of family planning practice on fertility decision-making power in South Korea. The log-linear analysis of the 1981 survey data by the Institute of Population and Health Services Research, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, shows that those urban and rural women who practice family planning or have experienced abortion exercise greater influence on a couple's fertility decision making than those who do not practice family planning or who have had no abortion experience. In addition, there is the interactive effect of abortion experience and contraceptive use on fertility decision making among urban women. This finding is significant because regardless of how birth control is available within a society, birth control use enhances women's decision making power where fertility is concerned.     

Family limitation among the Old Order Amish

Summary This paper shows that the Indiana Amish, a high-fertility Anabaptist population, regulate their marital fertility according to their family finances. We linked demographic data from the Indiana Amish Directory with personal property tax records at 5, 15 and 25 years after marriage and found fertility differences by occupation and wealth. Correlations between family size and wealth at the beginning, middle and end of childbearing years were positive. Wealthier women exhibited higher marital fertility, had longer first birth intervals, were older at the birth of their last child, and had larger families than poorer women. Over the past 30 years, marital fertility has remained constant among older women; but birth rates among younger women have been rising rapidly.     

Motivations for the use of birth control: Evidence from West Africa

A conventional assumption in the family planning literature is that birth control in developing countries is first adopted by high parity women who wish to cease childbearing. The empirical support for this belief has mainly been drawn from interview surveys on the motivations for, and the timing of, the inception of birth control among married women in areas where there is no cultural precedent for birth spacing by traditional means. This study, on the other hand, is based on data drawn from an area sample of 6,606 women, married or single, aged 15–59, in Ibadan, Nigeria, where there is a tradition for the practice of abstinence after a birth for the purpose of birth spacing. The Nigerian pattern revealed in the data presented here is indeed distinctive in many respects: (a) although premarital sex is prevalent, levels of premarital contraception are high; and (b) within marriage, spacing is the most prominent motivation for contraceptive practice, more important than the limitation of family size.     

Breastfeeding women and family planning programs: special needs and opportunities

Although breastfeeding makes a major contribution to fertility control and child spacing in many developing countries, the implications of this are not widely recognized. Terminology may be part of the reason. Contraception may imply something modern, whereas the contraceptive effect of breastfeeding is a natural biological mechanism. Also, many family planning program managers are educated in the West, where breastfeeding is of little contraceptive importance. Regardless of where they were educated, they may consider the pregnancy-postponing effects of breastfeeding as mythology, or may consider breastfeeding as sufficiently effective at the individual level. Breastfeeding as a family planning method cannot be "delivered" to women by family planning methods, and requires an educational approach rather than a clinical or medical approach. A women might use breastfeeding more confidently in avoiding an unplanned pregnancy if she begins using a contraceptive method as soon as she resumes menses, when she begins giving her baby food supplements, or by 6 months post partum--whichever comes first. She can achieve high effectiveness in avoiding pregnancy by keeping the baby nearby and feeding on demand, feeding frequently, sleeping near the baby and maintaining nightfeedings, not giving the baby bottles or pacifiers, and giving the baby only breastmilk for at least 4 months. Breastfeeding can only be used by new mothers and cannot be used to postpone the 1st birth. Nor is it appropriate for women who have attained their desired family size, or who wish to avoid or postpone pregnancy at any cost.     

Sub-Saharan Africa: population pressures on development

The population of sub-Saharan Africa, estimated at 434 million in 1984, is expected to reach 1.4 billion by 2025. The birth rate, currently 48/1000 population, continues to increase, and the death rate, 17/1000, is declining. Rapid population growth has curtailed government efforts to provide adequate nutrition, preserve the land base essential for future development, meet the demand for jobs, education, and health services, and address overcrowding in urban areas. Low education, rural residence, and low incomes are key contributors to the area's high fertility. Other factors include women's restricted roles, early age at marriage, a need for children as a source of security and support in old age, and limited knowledge of and access to modern methods of contraception. Average desired family size, which is higher than actual family size in most countries, is 6-9 children. Although government leaders have expressed ambivalence toward development of population policies and family planning programs as a result of the identification of such programs with Western aid donors, the policy climat is gradually changing. By mid-1984, at least 13 of the 42 countries in the region had indicated that they consider current fertility rates too high and support government and/or private family planning programs to reduce fertility. In addition, 26 countries in the region provide some government family planning services, usually integrated with maternal and child health programs. However, 10 countries in the region do not support family planning services for any reason. Unfortunately, sub-Saharan Africa has not yet produced a family planning program with a measurable effect on fertility that could serve as a model for other countries in the region. Social and economic change is central to any hope of fertility reduction in sub-Saharan Africa. Lower infant and child mortality rates, rising incomes, higher education, greater economic and social opportunities for women, and increased security would provide a climate more conducive to fertility decline. Given the limited demand, great sensitivity must be shown in implementing family planning programs.     

Family structure and and fertility behavior in Taiwan

The present analysis is based on the 1990 Taiwan Human Resources Survey to study the relationships between family structure, women's complete fertility and birth spacing. Imputed family size, as measured by either the ideal number of children expressed by a married woman or the number of actual surviving children whichever is larger, is used as a proxy of a woman's complete fertility. The results indicate a majority of married couples in Taiwan begin married life living with the husband's parents and later move out to establish a nuclear unit. This limited experience in the extended family exerts an upward pressure on imputed family size even when other relevant variables are statistically controlled. Further, the effect of living with the husband's parents on shorter duration of birth spacing is only limited to the time when the parents provide free child- care for married couples.     

一孩与二孩家庭育龄妇女生育意愿比较

基于江苏苏南某农村790户家庭的抽样调查数据,比较一孩与二孩家庭育龄妇女的生育意愿,并运用回归模型对影响两类家庭育龄妇女生育意愿的因素进行研究。结果显示,两类家庭育龄妇女的意愿生育数量、意愿生育性别和意愿生育间隔没有显著差异,仅在对"女性生育的最大年龄"的认识上二孩妇女明显低于一孩妇女。但两类家庭育龄妇女在生育意愿的影响因素上存在着较大的差异。     

The South African fertility decline: Evidence from two censuses and a Demographic and Health Survey

Inadequate data and apartheid policies have meant that, until recently, most demographers have not had the opportunity to investigate the level of, and trend in, the fertility of South African women. The 1996 South Africa Census and the 1998 Demographic and Health Survey provide the first widely available and nationally representative demographic data on South Africa since 1970. Using these data, this paper describes the South African fertility decline from 1955 to 1996. Having identified and adjusted for several errors in the 1996 Census data, the paper argues that total fertility at that time was 3.2 children per woman nationally, and 3.5 children per woman for African South Africans. These levels are lower than in any other sub-Saharan African country. We show also that fertility in South Africa has been falling since the 1960s. Thus, fertility transition predates the establishment of a family planning programme in the country in 1974.     

Evolution of fertility and mortality

Historical and current fertility trends in both Quebec and Canada as a whole are surveyed. While fertility among French Canadians was higher than that in neighboring provinces until the mid-20th century, in 1968 Quebec's crude birthrate was the lowest in Canada, and in 1972 it was 13.8 vs. 15.9 (the national birthrate). This reversal is explained in terms of the demographic transition theory, the declining influence of organized religion, and new opportunities for social mobility for minority groups. The birthrate throughout Canada is also declining. Although recent cohort studies are incomplete because women have not yet finished their reproductive years, it appears that completed family size will be lower than at any time in Canadian history. The period total fertility rate indicates an average family size of 1.8 children in 1976, but it is unclear whether this represents an actual reduction in family size or the postponement of childbearing. The sharpest fertility decline has been among women aged 35-49, but peak fertility rates have shifted from the 20-24 age group to those aged 25-29. Fertility is negatively related to education, and the lowest fertility is found among the intermediate income groups. Since the 1969 lifting of the ban on contraceptive sales and advertising, family planning activities have been stepped up. Also removed was the total ban on abortion. In 1975 there were 14.9 therapeutic abortions per 100 live births, but it has been charged that abortion standards are being applied inequitably from hospital to hospital.     

Stages of the Demographic Transition from a Child's Perspective: Family Size,Cohort Size,and Children's Resources

This article provides a new characterization of stages of the demographic transition from the perspective of children competing for resources within families and cohorts. In Stage 1 falling mortality increases the size of both families and birth cohorts. In Stage 2 falling fertility overtakes falling mortality to reduce family size, but population momentum causes continued growth in cohort size. In Stage 3 falling fertility overtakes population momentum to produce declining cohort size. We apply our framework to census microdata for eight countries and to United Nations population projections for a larger set of countries. The results suggest that most countries spend two to three decades in Stage 2, with declining family size offset by increasing cohort size. From the perspective of children aged 9–11, many countries enter Stage 3 between 2000 and 2010. Other countries, especially in Africa, will continue to experience increasing cohort size for several more decades.