Fertility

So one of my major research interests is fertility, and that's also one of the things the Harvard team is looking at here. They did a study on whether if you give a woman a certificate for birth control alone or with her husband she is more likely to use it. Not surprisingly, initial evidence points to women being more likely to use it when given the certificate alone. What was jarring to me, though, was just how much these women have to go through to get birth control, and, in many cases, hide it from there husbands. Reading through the qualitative answers, there were more than a few stories about women getting beaten when their husbands found out they were talking to someone about birth control. Women who received the certificate alone would hide it in their handbags and steal away to the clinic while their husbands were at the bar. You hear these stories in America, but reading the firsthand words of these women still shocked me.

Richard and I are working on a proposal to study why men want so many more children than women in countries like Zambia. Our hypothesis is that children are seen as a status good, and therefore the process of social comparison causes men to both desire high numbers of children, since their fathers and uncles have many children, and also to be insistent regarding this desire, and thus vehemently opposed to birth control or other family planning. While Richard and I were working on this proposal at his house, the housekeeper, Evelyn, started telling me that she had initially only wanted two kids, but after she had two kids, her first husband was killed. Then, she got remarried, and her new husband said he didn't want stepchildren, he wanted his own kids. He was also insistent that he wanted five kids. So, Evelyn told us, she had to have five more kids for a total of seven. When I asked her 11-year-old son, who happened to be over, how many kids he wanted, he said he only wanted three, because then he could give them good care and a good education. Maybe there's hope for generational change on this issue...