[The first part of this report of the Institute's 1993 symposium appeared in the last issue of the Newsletter.]
The pattern of fertility in England over the period 1600-1900 manifests two distinct phases:
This change was the fertility component of the demographic transition and two types of explanation are common:
Adjustment hypotheses. These argue that couples adjusted to new social and economic circumstances - in particular the demand for children decreased because survival increased. At a micro-economic level, some lifetime utility function is presumed to be maximised - couples want fewer children but invest more in each one; there is a trade-off between quality and quantity.
Innovation hypothesis. This argues for a cultural and ideational change - a new idea such as birth control gains currency.
So what are the demographic facts and how have they led to the innovation hypothesis? For the pre-transition periods data comes from family reconstructions for 25 villages in England. Fertility within marriage was pretty constant over time and from place to place. Family limitation was not practised. When the transition occurred there was a marked reduction in fertility within marriage simultaneously in all regions. It was not related to traditional economic variables. What was the common factor?
An adjustment hypothesis implies that couples could always make decisions about fertility whereas the innovation hypothesis recognises that pre-transition couples may have been unable to escape their natural fertility. To distinguish these hypotheses we have to answer two questions:
1. Did couples make reproductive decisions before the transition?
2. Was demand for children so high before the transition that they would not have chosen to limit family size?
The answers appear to be:
1. Apparently not. The shape of age curves suggests that no control of natural fertility was taking place. But this analysis would not identify birth spacing and the family reconstruction technique aggregates long periods so that temporary periods of limitation would not be spotted.
2. Demand for children is very difficult to assess. Three main advantages are postulated:
Psychic benefits. These tend to be ignored because they are probably constant across all societies and times, both before and after the transition;
Family finances. Children are assumed to bring in more money than they cost to rear. This appear not to have been true before the transition as children left home very early and sent back very little income;
Old age security. This is much more equivocal. It certainly seems that elderly couples needed supporting (the concept of “transfer payments”). But were children significant in providing these? What little evidence there is does suggest that this was probably so.
Patterns of reproduction can be analysed into three components:
Starting. What proportion of women bear children at all and at what age do they start?
Spacing. What is the pattern of birth intervals? In particular, is there evidence of parity-dependent spacing which would suggest some attempt at deliberate family limitation once a desired size is reached?
Stopping. The cessation of reproduction.
Before the demographic transition, extra-marital childbearing was rare and marriage patterns had a considerable influence on the commencement of childbearing. In north-west Europe, age and incidence of marriage were quite responsive to declining mortality. This was because of the emphasis on the nuclear family - starting a new household was dependent on the availability of a suitable homestead. In some countries this was chiefly through inheritance but in England there was a market in accommodation so that the accumulation of wealth was a more important consideration.
Since 1950 the rate of world population growth has risen sharply, peaked and fallen dramatically. There has been little change in the rate of growth since 1980 but this is due to technicalities such as age structure and to stabilisation in India and China following rapid decline in the 1970s - it does not necessarily mean that fertility has stopped falling.
There is enormous world-wide variation in the pattern of fertility change over the last 30 years from steep decline in Latin America to negligible decline in East Africa.
Relevant factors in some countries are:
Economic changes can encourage decline despite government hostility to family limitation. Thus fertility rates in North and South Korea have now converged, although only in the South has family planning been encouraged.
Government policy has been effective in some countries, especially in north Africa and west Asia, where decline has been greatest in the poorest regions.
Catholicism has proved a barrier to fertility decline in the Philippines - but not in Latin America.
Female literacy correlates highly with the huge disparity between fertility rates in different Indian states.
It is clear that any search for a simple explanation of decline is doomed to failure. For every hypothesised factor, a counter example can be found. However, the best long term bet is education but the best immediate answer is political initiative.
Much of the substantial shift in fertility in the developed world since 1945 has been due to timing shifts. The baby boom, for example, was significantly due to a higher rate of marriage and earlier childbearing.
Trends in the mean age at childbearing for eleven European countries examined were remarkably similar. All showed a steady decline from 1951 to a low point of between 26.2 and 27.5 years. In ten of the eleven countries the turning point fell between 1974 and 1976, Italy following in 1979.
The fall in mean age at first birth reversed earlier than the mean age for all births (the latter in 1972 in England and Wales). The mean age for all births is influenced not only by mean age at first birth but by subsequent spacing and by the total number of children women have.
There has been an even more dramatic fall in the median age at last birth, from 33.3 for the cohort of 1911 to 28.2 for the cohort of 1945.
Part of the explanation for these trends may be greater confidence in birth control methods associated with the introduction of the contraceptive pill. Women are much more ready to start a family and to complete their intended family size if they are confident that they can stop if they want to. Without this confidence, there is an incentive to delay starting a family and then to space children as widely as possible.
Another factor is the changing pattern of working and childbearing, with a balance of two effects:
“Work Now” - the traditional approach, perhaps enjoying a revival, of working for a substantial period before a late start to a family with longer birth intervals and a late finish.
“Work Later” - an approach dominant in the 1950s and 1960s, facilitated by contraceptive confidence, aimed at an early start to a family with short birth intervals and as early a finish to childbearing as possible to allow the mother to take up paid work.
In 1990/1991 a study was carried out in an industrial town in north west England into the implications of new reproductive technologies. The perspective of the study was that of the social anthropologist.
Despite a decline in pronatalist attitudes in the 1970s, women in the survey felt themselves under strong pressure to reproduce. New reproductive technologies have removed from childless couples the excuse of infertility. Couples in their mid twenties either had children or were assumed to be planning them. There was wariness of exploiting the possibility of restoring fertility to post-menopausal women, primarily because of concern for the children of elderly parents.
Surrogate motherhood prompted a variety of views, particularly questioning of the surrogate’s motives. Compared with surrogacy, many people viewed gamete donation as almost natural and certainly acceptable if the gametes came from relatives so that the child would have the same pattern of kinship as if it had really been the offspring of its parents.
Why people have children at all was a question that those in the survey found difficult. There are clearly biological urges and social pressures, but the reality of raising children prompted at least on woman to remark that perhaps she needed her head testing.
The Taureg of the northern Sahara are a pastoralist group who were, until three years ago, nomadic and depended almost entirely on animals for wealth - although they would trade animals for grain to eat.
Compared to a neighbouring Bambara group, the Taureg experienced low fertility. This was without any contraceptive usage at all.
The main reason was the monogamous Taureg culture. There was a relatively low rate of “currently married” people, a high divorce rate, high male mortality, a tendency for men to marry late, a consequent shortage of men and no sex outside marriage.
To the demographer, the marriage pattern appeared to be a device for constraining population growth. But the Taureg viewed the matter very differently. They were concerned at their low fertility and perceived no external constraints that would encourage them to limit childbearing. To them, their marriage patterns, although reducing fertility by 30 percent and although quite different to those adopted by the Bambara, were not a device but a constraint. Monogamy was a cultural given, not a matter of choice.