Fertility Decision Making

8/10/2019 Fertility Decision Making

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Fertility Decision Making



Three Levels of Decision Making

• Family Unit

• National Level• Global Level



Family-Level Decision Making

• At the family level, parental and other

family members’ perceptions aboutthe value and the costs of childreninfluence reproductive decision

making.



Four Variables in affecting the“demand” for children

• Children’s labor value

• Children’s value as old-age supportfor parents

• Infant and child mortality rates

• Economic costs of children



• Relationship is positive:

▫ when children’s value is high in termsof labor or old-age support, fertility islikely to be higher.

▫ When infant and child mortality ratesare high, fertility rates also tend to behigh in order to “replace” offspring who do not survive.



• Relationship is negative:

▫ In the case of costs – including directcost (for food, education, clothing) andindirect cost (employment opportunities

that the mother gives up).

▫ Higher costs promote the desire for

fewer children.



• Industrialization, improvement in income,

urbanization, and schooling are like to reducelabour value of children and greatly increasetheir costs.

• Provision of old age security and pension plans by the state may reduce that fertility incentive,although few developing countries have

instituted such policies thus far.



• The husbands and wives both tried to achievetheir goals with the one method available: sex-

selective infanticide, or the killing of offspringon the basis of sex.

▫ Example : in Japan, paternity related cases, andthe kinship system in Tonga.



The National Level

• Governments are concerned about providingemployment and public services, maintainingthe tax base, filling the ranks of the military,maintaining ethnic and regional proportions, addealing with population aging.

▫ Japan, and European countries concerningdeclining growth rates

▫ RH Bill in the PH.



Global Level

• Global power structures such as World Bank,pharmaceutical companies, and religious leadersinfluence national and individual prioritiesabout fertility.



Fertility Control

• All cultures throughout history have had ways ofinfluencing fertility, including ways to increaseit, reduce it, and regulating its spacing.

▫ Hundreds of direct indigenous fertility controlmethods are available cross-culturally, and manyof them were in existence long before modernscience came on the scene.



• Induced Abortion

▫ Direct intervention in a pregnancy may beresorted to in lead to abortion (expulsion of thefetus from the womb).

• attitudes toward abortion range from absolute

acceptability to conditional approval (abortion isacceptable under specified conditions), tolerance(abortion is regarded with neither approval nordisapproval), and opposition and punishment

for offenders.



Reasons/Factors to Induce Abortion

• Economic and Social Factors

▫ Heavy workload

▫ Stress

• Poverty

• Legitimacy



• Some governments have intervened in familydecisions to regulate access to abortion,sometimes promoting it and other timesforbidding it.

▫ One child one policy in china

▫ RH Bill in the PH



The New Reproductive Technologies

• Women’s reproductive rights are an importantcontemporary issues in all cultures. These rights

may involve the choice of seeking abortion insome cultures, and in another (such as China),the right to bear a child. They include the issue

of the right to decide the gender or othercharacteristics of an unborn child.



• One development is the ability to gain geneticinformation about the fetus, which can be used by parents in decision making about whether tocontinue or stop pregnancy.

• Amniocentesis is a legal test used to revealcertain genetic problems in the fetus, such asdown syndrome.



• In vitro fertilization procedures are another

important feature of the new reproductivetechnologies. This is designed to bypassinfertility in a woman or couple and thuspromote fertility.



Culture and Death

• Infanticide

▫ The deliberate killing of offspring has been widely

documented cross-culturally, although it is notusually a frequent or common practice in anysociety.



Different Forms of Infanticide

• Direct Infanticide

▫ The death of an infant or child resulting from

actions such as beating, smothering, poisoning, ordrowning.

• Indirect Infanticide

▫ A more subtle process, may involve prolongedpractices such as food deprivation, failure to take asick infant to a clinic, or failure to provide warmclothing in winter.



• Suicide

▫ A legally or religiously defined as a crime.▫ Durkheim defined suicide as the act of severingsocial relationships.

▫ He explored the differing suicide rates among

Protestants and Catholics. He explained howsocially controlled Catholics had a lower suiciderate.

▫ Said that abnormally high or low levels or social

integration may result in increased suicide rates.



• Results he found include:

▫ Suicide rates are higher for widowed, single or

divorced people rather than those who aremarried.

▫ Rates are higher for those who have no childrenrather than those who do .

▫ Rates are higher among Protestants thanCatholics.

▫ Coroners in a Catholic country are less likely torecord a suicide as the reason of death because inCatholism it is a sin.



Distinguished 4 types of suicide:

• Altruistic suicide: Individual is extremelyattached to the society and because of this has

no life of their own.▫ Japanese Kamikazee

▫ “Sati” – the suicide of a wife upon the death of herhusband, has been practiced in parts of India forseveral hundred years and, on occasion, into thepresent.



• Egoistic Suicide: Individual is weakly integrated intoa society so ending their life will have little impacton the rest of society.

• Anomic suicide: There is a weak social

regulation between society’s norms and theindividual and is most often brought on bydramatic economic or social changes.



• Epidemics AIDS, HIV, and other diseases

• Violence

▫ Private Violence: Spousal abuse

▫ Genocide



• Lethal spousal violence is known to exist

throughout most of the world in varying degrees,although it is difficult to pinpoint cross – cultural rates because statistics areundependable or unavailable.

• Anecdotal evidence suggest that in much of theMiddle East, a husband may kill his wife or

daughter without fear of punishment, as thoughit is within his rights in terms of protectingfamily honor.



• In India, new form of femicide, or murder ofperson based on the fact of being female.

▫ Dowry death

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