The Global Fertility Gap
Far from having too many children, many women in developing countries, like their peers in the rich world, are actually having too few: that is, fewer children than they’d like to have.
This claim may seem strange: we’re used to hearing about the problem of excessively high fertility in Africa, or the unmet need for contraception. But while unintended or undesired pregnancies are indeed concerningly high in many developing countries, where contraceptive access could be improved, that’s only part of the story. At the same time, total fertility has often plummeted rapidly, even falling below desired fertility.
This claim has been nearly impossible to prove in the past for the simple reason that data on desired or ideal fertility has been hard to come by. None of the major international databases on fertility include any systematic, worldwide collection of data on fertility preferences. In layman’s terms, nobody has been systematically recording how many children women around the world actually want to have. This is shocking since women’s childbearing desires and ideals are widely recognized to have a big influence on fertility behaviors , and because governments and NGOs spend tens of billions of dollars every year on family planning programs domestically and abroad. But alas, around the world, policies intended to enhance reproductive rights and enable family planning are often enacted without any consideration of what women actually say they desire.
I have compiled a database from numerous sources on the average number of children a woman of childbearing age in a given country says is ideal to have. The exact question varies somewhat across time and country, but I have tried to focus on personal ideals to the extent possible. I generally prefer questions like,“If you had enough resources for it, how many children would be ideal for you, personally, to have?”Where questions about personal ideals aren’t available, I include general ideals. I do not include questions about intentions to maintain comparability. Overall, I have 727 data points, covering 141 countries, derived from 86 sources, reported in 63 different years, ranging from 1936 to 2018. That may sound like a lot, but the World Bank’s database on fertility has over 11,000 data points. In other words, even with numerous sources, I can only produce a very small database of fertility preferences compared to databases on actual fertility.
https://blog.csdn.net/weixin_43206161
