Determinants of fertility and the unmet need for family planning in Indonesia

Indonesia's fertility has declined to an average of slightly more than 3 children/woman. The islands of Java and Bali have the lowest birth rates. Indonesia's family planning program has been a model of innovation, flexibility, and community involvement, and has been effective in reducing fertility, changing family preferences, and increasing contraceptive use. Fertility decline is also determined by factors other than contraceptive use, as provinces in Jakarta and East Java has low fertility and low contraceptive use. Recent research by Suyono and Palmore found that among cohorts of women in Jakarta lowest fertility rates were explained by greater nonexposure to pregnancy in an unmarried state or by a divorced or widowed status, and by infecundity. In East Java, fertility determinants were the same with the possible addition of lower coital frequency. The study estimated nonexposure due to marriage, infecundity, and contraceptive use. Policy considerations, however, are concerned with the exposed state of the percentage of time women are currently married, fecund, not using contraceptive, and sexually active. Suyono and Palmore also calculated the percentage of time spent in the exposed state by province. The estimates ranged from 12% in Yogyakarta to 25% in West Java and the Outer Islands. Exposed was further divided into groups with a manifest, latent, and no current need. Women with a manifest need for family planning are those who are aware of their contraceptive needs to stop or postpone childbearing and not using. Manifest need was highest in high fertility areas: 12% in Central Java, 13% in West Java, and 12% in the Outer Islands. Programs targeting these women should focus on wider availability of information and services. Women with latent needs are unaware of their need for family planning and are not using contraception. These women were also concentrated in high fertility areas. The percentage of years spent in the latent unmet need state was estimated at 23-24% in West Java and the Outer Islands. Program emphasis should be on education and motivation to show how family size can be controlled. Women with current need can be educated toward future acceptance.     

Abortion,Family Planning,and Population Policy: Prospects for the Common‐Ground Approach

For the past several decades those engaged in shaping the Program of Action documents at international conferences on population have muted their voices when the topic of abortion has been raised. In a desire to side‐step entanglement in a bitter debate over the morality of abortion, great care has been taken to define “family planning” in ways that explicitly exclude abortion. The “common‐ground” approach to treating abortion can be summarized in two directives found in all contemporary international population documents: “in no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning”; and all governments should work “to reduce the recourse to abortion through expanded and improved family‐planning services.” This article has three goals: first, to examine the appropriateness of these directives with respect to what is currently known about the relationship between abortion, family planning, and population policy; second, to trace how this “contraception‐only” definition of family planning became de rigueur at international population conferences; and third, to discuss the prospects for the emergence of a more appropriate “common‐ground” approach to abortion and population policy.     

“Demodystopias”: Prospects of Demographic Hell

Dystopian fiction, stories envisioning dire human futures, originated with the novels of H. G. Wells and others a century ago. “Demodystopias” are a subgenre of dystopias where the imagined futures derive from demographic change, taken perhaps to an extreme: the population explosion, aging and depopulation, mass migration, global epidemics, and the eugenic possibilities of new reproductive technologies. This essay traces the genealogy of demodystopias over the twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries. Their themes reflect the demographic issues of the day: fear of overpopulation in the “population bomb” era; later, threatened societal senescence or swamping by immigrants under ultra‐low fertility; new reproductive regimes under genetic engineering; and the geopolitics of demographic change. As with other dystopias, demodystopias seek to identify present‐day negative tendencies that might lead to a future theatrum diabolorum—and to pin responsibility for such an outcome on ourselves. Authors discussed include Margaret Atwood, Anthony Burgess, Günter Grass, Michel Houellebecq, José Saramago, Lionel Shriver, and Kurt Vonnegut.     

The population debate: A survey of opinions of a professional organization's membership

In analyzing results of a survey concerning population issues taken among members of an organization devoted to the scientific study of population, namely, the Population Association of America, we found high agreement that: (1) world population growth was much too high, (2) many of today's serious problems are caused by overpopulation, and (3) the U.S. should help any requesting country establish programs to curtail growth. There was no consensus, however, on issues such as: (1) ideal population size, (2) family planning as the most reasonable means of reducing population growth, (3) the need to initiate coercive birth control immediately, (4) redistribution of resources as a long-term solution to overpopulation, (5) how to solve population problems in time to avoid widespread catastrophe, and (6) whether the U.S. should exert pressure on other countries to establish a family planning program as a prerequisite to economic aid. These findings apply with few exceptions to four subcategories of members defined on the basis of extent of demographic training and employment.     

The Argument from Overpopulation—Logical and Ethical Considerations

A traditional subject for discussion in population debates is whether the world or any subdivisions of it are overpopulated. Some proclaim that we are indeed in a state of overpopulation, while others persistently deny this claim. However, statements which proclaim or deny overpopulation are almost never accompanied by satisfactory definitions as to what overpopulation means. This is most unsatisfactory, especially because whether or not overpopulation is a fact is often claimed to be crucial when it comes to the justification of population political recommendations. This article considers an argument from overpopulation, according to which overpopulation justifies policies which reduce population size; and an argument against overpopulation, according to which the fact that present problems can be handled without population reductions establishes that there is no state of overpopulation. Both arguments are rejected by clarifying possible definitions of overpopulation.     

J. R. Hicks on the Economics of Population

Sir John Hicks (1904–89), professor of political economy at Oxford University from 1952 to 1965, was one of the foremost economists of his time, making notable contributions to the theory of wages, general equilibrium theory, and welfare economics. He received (jointly with Kenneth Arrow) the 1972 Nobel prize in economics. Value and Capital (1939), his best-known book, is held as a classic; his 1937 exegesis of Keynes's General Theory has long been a staple of undergraduate economics. Population does not figure appreciably in his writings, although an almost offhand footnote attached to the concluding paragraph of Value and Capital suggests that it could have: “[0]ne cannot repress the thought that perhaps the whole Industrial Revolution of the last two hundred years has been nothing else but a vast secular boom, largely induced by the unparalleled rise in population.” (He added: “If this is so, it would help to explain why, as the wisest hold, it has been such a disappointing episode in human history.”) In his late work, A Theory of Economic History (1969), however, the principal driving force in economic development is depicted as the expansion of markets. A sustained discussion of the topic of population by Hicks is contained in one of his earlier books. The Social Framework: An Introduction to Economics (Oxford University Press, 1942). Chapters 4 and 5 of this book treat “Population and Its History” and “The Economics of Population”; one of the appendixes is “On the Idea of an Optimum Population.” Chapter 5 and this appendix are reprinted below. The Social Framework was written as an introductory text, although its lucid style characterized all of Hicks's work. It covered both theory and applications with particular attention to the then novel subject of national accounting. Hicks described the book as “economic anatomy” in contrast to the “economic physiology” of how the economy works. Chapter 5 gives equal attention to under- and overpopulation, both seen as posing dangers. The Preface to the 1971 (fourth) edition of The Social Framework notes that the population and labor force chapters “have been rather substantially altered—to take account of the curious things that have happened in these fields (which one might have expected to be slow moving).” In 1971 he is more cautious than in 1942 about suggesting that slowing population growth might have been a factor in the 1930s depression, and readier to admit of countries where “a continuing rise in population, even while there is some continuing agricultural improvement, is likely to lead in the end to unemployment and destitution.” The appendix on optimum population was retained through all editions.     

The objectives of government policies on fertility control in Eastern Europe

Although demographers from the communist countries continue to maintain that overpopulation in the Malthusian sense Is possible only under capitalism, some East European demographers now concede that a form of overpopulation may, at times and under certain conditions, exist In a communist society. In this connection the ideological framework for an optimum population policy under communism has been developed, and demographers have been given the task of determining what the optimum population is and how it is to be attained. There has been considerable ferment on the Issue of fertility control in both the literature and action programmes of Poland, Chechoslovakia, and Hungary. The latter two countries have conducted surveys on family planning, including the use and effectiveness of contraceptives, and have established demographic journals.

All the communist countries of Eastern Europe except Albania and East Germany have relaxed laws restricting abortions and conducted campaigns for the spread of contraceptives. At the same time family allowances have been continued. These paradoxically divergent policies can be rationalized as attempts to sustain existing families while providing the basis for regulating future fertility to achieve an optimum population in relation to the resources of the respective countries.     

Population in the UN Environment Programme's Global Environment Outlook 2000

Most specialized agencies in the United Nations system have taken to compiling a periodic status report on their field. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) issued the first in a proposed biennial series in 1998, titled Global Environment Outlook‐1 or GEO‐1. The second in the series, Global Environment Outlook 2000, was published in 1999. GEO‐2000 is described by the UNEP's Executive Director, Klaus Töpfer, in the foreword as “a comprehensive integrated assessment of the global environment at the turn of the millennium… [and] a forward‐looking document, providing a vision into the 21st century.” Its status, however, is rendered uncertain by the printed caution that “The contents of this volume do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of UNEP or contributory organizations.” GEO‐2000 paints a generally bleak picture of environmental trends. It evidences a wide array of particulars (“In the Southern Ocean, the Patagonian toothfish is being over‐fished and there is a large accidental mortality of seabirds caught up in fishing equipment”), but perhaps of more import are its statements about the root causes of environmental problems and what must be done. The excerpts below reflect some of these general views as they pertain to population. They are taken from the section entitled “Areas of danger and opportunity” in Chapter 1 of the report, and from the section “Tackling root causes” in Chapter 5. High resource consumption, fueled by affluent, Western lifestyles, is seen as a basic cause of environmental degradation. Cutting back this consumption will be required, freeing up resources for development elsewhere. Materialist values associated with urban living are part of the problem, given the concentration of future population growth in cities. And “genuine globalization” will entail free movement of people as well as capital and goods, thus optimizing “the population to environmental carrying capacity.” Some of these positions are at least questionable: the supposed “innate environmental sensitivity of people raised on the land or close to nature,” or the aim of “globalization of population movements.” The latter does not appear in the recommendations, perhaps because of an implicit assumption that the effect of open borders on environmental trends is unlikely to be favorable. (For an earlier statement of the same sentiment—from 1927—see the comments by Albert Thomas, first director of the ILO, reproduced in the Archives section of PDR 9, no. 4.)     

Heterogeneity,dependence among causes of death and Gompertz

Heterogeneity in a population with respect to mortality, or variation in “frailty”; among members of that population, which has been discussed extensively in the literature over the last decade and a half is essential to any realistic model of dependence among causes of death. The main problem then is the development of a mortality model incorporating heterogeneity and cause of death which is both realistic and of manageable proportions.

In a recent paper (J. H. Pollard, 1991), it has been shown that many life table results are remarkably insensitive to the strict shape of the mortality curve, at least for more developed populations, and that accurate approximations can in many cases be obtained knowing only the mortality rates at two representative ages (e.g. 50 and 70). These results and the Gompertz “law”; of mortality can be used to develop manageable approximate formulae for the expectation of life under heterogeneity and correlation among the causes of death. The formulae are confirmed by simulation.

Numerical results indicate, somewhat surprisingly, that the effects of correlation among causes of death, even at quite high levels, on expectation of life and changes on expectation of life when particular causes of death are reduced or eliminated are relatively minor.     

What state,what markets,for what development?

The collapse of “real socialism” and “peripheric late capitalism” and the exhaustion of the various models of “Welfare capitalism” demand the theoretical and practical reconstruction of the entire field of the eco-socio-economy of development and planning. Among the criteria for a new approach would be social equity and environmental prudence. This project should be then translated into a strategy for development which implies in turn a re-definition of state, market and the role of civil society and the forms of interaction between social actors. At the same time, the ways of articulation between the various areas - local, national, global — of development should be defined. In this framework, planning should be seen as a set of procedures for promoting societal debate on the “project”, in order to elaborate long-term strategies and identify the range of the decisions to be taken.     

U. S. population growth as an abstractly-perceived problem

Recent public opinion polls report that a majority of Americans consider the nation’s population growth rate to be a “serious” problem. Little systematic evidence exists on whether they view the problem as a factor that the individual married couple should consider in deciding on family size. A survey of 134 adult women living in a limited-income family housing project in a relatively small and isolated American community suggests: the view that continued population growth is a problem in the United States is endorsed more strongly than the view that the couple has a responsibility to limit its fertility because of overpopulation; and concern with population growth is only loosely associated with acceptance of the individual responsibility attitude. Among subgroups of respondents, Catholics were more likely to hold a negative attitude toward population growth than to possess the individual responsibility view and they exhibited a correlation between the two attitudes. Protestants were distinguished by no difference in or correlation between the acceptance of the two attitudes. A correlation between the attitudes was especially pronounced among Catholics with high achievement values. It is suggested that measures explicitly intended to control population growth probably cannot be adopted until there is a strong correlation between the two attitudes.     

Making E.T. Perfectly Queer

In the wake of E.T.'s 1982 debut, film critics Marina Heung and Vivian Sobchack established that the enduring appeal of E.T. inheres in the dissolution of the nuclear heterosexual family over the latter half of the twentieth century and the film's “fairy tale” stand-in for the “mythology of family relations” that Dana Cloud terms “conservative familialism.” As Carl Plantinga puts it, E.T. offers a “virtual solution … to [a] traumatic problem.” Despite this, however, E.T. remains for many an inconsolable tragedy. Approaching E.T. from the perspective of the queer child who grows “more sideways than up,” in the real absence of a fairy tale solution to the traumatic problem of conservative familialism, I here seek to identify and celebrate E.T.'s “complex range of queerness” that has until now remained largely closeted.     

以人为本 制度创新——对深圳建立城市流动人口计生协经验的思考

在我国现行制度下 ,长期滞留城市的“流动人口”由于没有“身份” ,而缺少正式组织网络和与政府畅通的沟通渠道 ,因此自组织现象比较突出 ,维权的需求迫切 ,成为城市人口管理的一个难点。深圳市通过建立流动人口计生协 ,“以宣传为先导 ,以群众参与为关键 ,以真情服务为根本 ,以提高生育质量、转变生育观念为主题” ,来开展“生产 ,生活 ,生育”服务 ,为流动人口“营造一个家” ,取得了多重社会效益 ,对新时期城市计生协的工作定位以重要启示 ,同时反映了我国未来计划生育事业的发展方向     

Mauritius: Demographic upsurge and prospect

A brief account is given of the demographic and economic history of Mauritius over the last century, and of the close interaction of these factors, and against this background the current situation is reviewed.

A relatively static position of high birth and death rates has given way to one of rapid population increase, due in part to a temporary rise in the birth rate, but more especiall to the virtual eradication of the few diseases which had been responsible for the former exceedingly high death rate. Recent improvements in both the quality and detail of population statistics enables the situation to be examined in some detail, and with distinction of the various ethnic groups comprising the Mauritian population.

A series of population projections, with all the doubts attached to the assumptions on which they are based, nertheless demonstrate the serious risk of overpopulation facing the country. The various facets of this problem are examined: the possibility of introducing birth control to a primarily Catholic country, of expanding the basic industry—sugar cane exporting, or of establishing new industries.     

Openings: On the Journal of Homosexuality,Volume 1, Issue 1

ABSTRACT

This article serves as one of the supplementary pieces of this special issue on “Mapping Queer Bioethics,” in which we take a solipsistic turn to “map” the Journal of Homosexuality itself. Here, the author examines Volume 1, Issue 1 of the Journal of Homosexuality and asks whether the journal’s first contributors might reveal a historically problematic relationship whereby the categories of front-line LGBT health advocates in the 1970s might be incommensurate with the post-AIDS, queer politics that would follow in decades to come.     

Frank Fetter on Population Versus Prosperity

How population change affects human welfare was a central concern of economists during the decades that followed publication of Malthus's Essay. But from the middle of the nineteenth century, continuing for some one hundred years, population issues played a marginal role in economics, with leading figures of that discipline, particularly in the New World, turning their attention to the topic only episodically. The presidential address delivered by Frank Fetter to the American Economic Association in 1913 is a notable example of such attention. Frank Albert Fetter (1863–1949), much of whose career was spent as professor on the faculty of Princeton University, was a prominent economic theorist of the early decades of the twentieth century and author, among numerous other works, of the influential texts Principles of Economics (1904) and its two-volume successors, Economic Principles (1915) and Modern Economic Problems (1916 and 1922). Population was an early interest of Fetter's, as is shown by the topic of his doctoral dissertation, which he wrote, after studies at Indiana University, Cornell, and the Sorbonne, at the University of Halle (Versuch einer Bevölkerungslehre ausgehend von einer Kritik des Malthus'schen Bevölkerungsprincips, Jena: G. Fischer, 1894). His address to the AEA recalls that interest, looking back on the decade ending in 1910, a period of rapid population increase in the United States, fueled by heavy immigration. In the first part of the address, Fetter offers insightful comments on Malthus's novel humanitarian and democratic formulation of the population problem and on the contrasting demographic situation between Europe and the United States. But with the closing of the land frontier he sees American exceptionalism coming to an end, as the economic forces—abundant natural resources and progress in science and the “technical arts”—that heretofore counteracted the depressing effect of population growth on wages “have spent themselves.” At a time when the US population was about one-third of its present size, he argued that “we have passed the point of diminishing returns in the relation of our population to our resources.” Therefore “it is high time to revise the optimistic American doctrine of population.” To control “the fate and fortunes of the children of this and future generations,” the US would need a policy of conserving natural resources and retarding the increase of population. Of the two components of population growth—natural increase and immigration—only the latter is “controllable in large measure by legislative action.” Fetter thus devotes the second part of his address to a discussion of the effects of immigration on the American economy. His line of argument closely parallels an influential strand in the contemporary US debate on that issue. In the first decade of the century, the population of the United States grew by some 16 million and the number of immigrants was nearly 9 million. Fetter sees the potential for further immigration as nearly limitless, given an open-door policy. The motive to migrate to the United States would not cease “until real wages in America are leveled down to those of the most impoverished populations permitted to enter our ports.” Yet reducing American prosperity would afford “no permanent relief to the overcrowded lands,” as “natural increase quickly fills the ranks of an impoverished peasantry.” While unrestricted immigration is against the interest of the mass of the people, conflicting interests, ideas, and sentiments paralyze remedial action: individual or class advantage comes before consideration of the “larger national welfare.” Unless immigration is restricted, Americans may find “that they have bartered the peace and security of their children for the pleasures of a brief season.” The text of Fetter's address is reproduced below in full from American Economic Review, vol. 3, no. 1: Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, March 1913.     

Uphold and develop Mao Zedong's thoughts on population]

Mao Zedong's thoughts on population were based upon the positions, viewpoints, methods, and basic theory of Marxism, with some adjustments made according to China's practical situation. The population theory of Marxism was developed and used with creative elements. Mao Zedong's thoughts on population can be summarized in three points: (1) An understanding of China's backwar economy and culture and their relationship to overpopulation. There is an urgent need to solve the population problem. (2) An understanding of the close relationship between material production and the reproduction of human beings themselves. A balance between the two should be achieved. (3) Family planning should be practiced so that population growth may be put under control. Under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the Party's Central Committee has reconfirmed and developed Mao Zedong's population thoughts in various important official documents and writings. In such new writings, special emphasis is placed on the fact that with limited arable land, China has to plan its population growth and that family planning should be made part of the national policy. With ideological education serving as a foundation, special administrative actions and economic measures should be taken to motivate and transform the general public. Mao Zedong's thoughts on population and related new developments represent the crystallization of the Party's collective wisdom.     

The analysis of linkages in demographic theory

Many seemingly different questions that arise in the analysis of population change can be phrased as the same technical question: How, within a given demographic model, would variable y change if the age- or time-specific function f were to change arbitrarily in shape and intensity? At present demography lacks the machinery to answer this question in analytical and general form. This paper suggests a method based on modern functional calculus for deriving closed-form expressions for the sensitivity of demographic variables to changes in input functions or schedules. It uses this “linkage method” to obtain closed-form expressions for the response of the intrinsic growth rate, birth rate, and age composition of a stable population to arbitrary marginal changes in its age patterns of fertility and mortality. It uses it also to obtain expressions for the transient response of the age composition of a nonstable population to time-varying changes in the birth sequence, and to age-specific fertility and mortality patterns that change over time. The problem of “bias” in period vital rates is also looked at.     

Population policy in Mainland China

Population policy in Communist China has little demographic significance. It is of interest mainly for what it reveals about the nature of the administrative and decision making process in Peking. Although the evidence is often ambiguous, six fairly distinct phases of population policy can be distinguished, during which policy shifted from categoric denial of population problems to an endorsement of birth control and back to the denial of population problems. There are indications that the birth control campaign was first activated in response to fears of overpopulation, that it was abandoned during the “ leap forward ” in 1958 because the Chinese Communist leaders actually believed their economic expedients had achieved miraculous success, and that the recent absence of explicit policy reflects both a disillusionment with the “ leap forward ” and reluctance to resume openly the birth control campaign. Apparently, Peking is at present waiting hopefully for good news from the agricultural front before undertaking another major policy revision; if this hope is disappointed, the consequences may have great international significance.