Explaining Fertility Transitions

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Citation: Mason, K. O. (1997) Explaining Fertility Transitions. Demography (RSS)
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Explaining Fertility Transitions
Tagged: uw-madison (RSS), wisconsin (RSS), sociology (RSS), demography (RSS), prelim (RSS), qual (RSS), WisconsinDemographyPrelimAugust2009 (RSS)

Summary

Notes: In this essay the author suggests that the crisis in our understanding of fertility transitions is more apparent than real. Although most existing theories of fertility transition have been partially or wholly discredited, this reflects a tendency to assume that all fertility transitions share one or two causes, to ignore mortality decline as a precondition for fertility decline, to assume that pretransitional fertility is wholly governed by social constraints rather than by individual decision-making, and to test ideas on a decadal time scale. She argues that without mortality decline, a fertility decline would be highly unlikely, moreover she says that the contexts in which fertility declined in developed and in developing countries is very different and therefore may have had different causes. Besides, more than one combination of causes may have played a role in different settings. She also note that postnatal controls, such as infanticide, adoption, fostering, marring children at young ages, migration and service, were adopted by many societies as a way to control family size. She also points out that pretransitional and transitional populations also planned their family sizes (and used postnatal controls to reach it). Her idea is that fertility decline when the costs involved in postnatal controls increase and then couples switch to prenatal methods of fertility control. She ends the essay by suggesting a perceptual, interactive approach to explaining fertility transitions that is closely allied to existing theories but focuses on conditions that lead couples to switch from postnatal to prenatal controls on family size. The problem is that she provides a good critic of certain theories, but her alternative theory is clearly not consistent.