Women's status and fertility: successive cross-sectional evidence from Tamil Nadu, India, 1970-80

Abstract

This study explores linkages between the status of women and fertility over time in Tamil Nadu, India, using sample survey data for currently married women aged 35-44 in 1970 and 1980. The effects of individual indicators of the status of women on fertility are decomposed into effects through each of the proximate variables, notably those affecting marriage duration, marital fertility, and contraception. There is considerable variation in the direction and magnitude of the relationships between the status indicators and fertility behavior and in the relationship to the underlying mechanisms at the two points in time. On balance, the evidence suggests improvements in the status of women come to exert an increasingly negative effect on fertility over the course of demographic transition.

PIP: This study of the status of women and reproductive behavior was conducted in 1970 for 2135 currently married women 15-44 years and 1980 for 798 such women in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and used the Easterlin and Crimmons synthesis model of fertility determination. Improvement in women's status affects the fertility transition through the sum of its effects on variables related to the potential supply of children in a household, the demand for children, and the costs involved in the practice of fertility regulation. Transition occurs when demand for children is reduced, fertility regulation attitudes are positive and access assured, and fertility is in excess due to health improvement. When surviving children exceed desired children, motivation to regulate fertility occurs. The hypothesized relationships between intervening variables (marital duration, birth intervals, child mortality, no secondary fertility, desired family size, contraceptive methods know, interspousal communication, duration of use) and the effect of women's status indicators on intervening variables, and children everborn via intervening variables are shown in chart form. Relationships are analyzed in 3 parts. One is a Bongaarts type equation measuring births as a function of exposure to pregnancy, fecundability, secondary sterility, child mortality, and duration of contraceptive use. A 2nd equation measures the duration of contraceptive use as a function of demand for and supply of children, and the subjective costs of the number of methods known and spousal communication on family size limits. The 3rd equation used the independent variables in equations 1 and 2 as a function of a vector of variables (female and economic household status). Results show that not all of the selected women's status factors are related to fertility behavior. Also, there is confirmation that the relationship between women's status indicators and fertility behavior is dynamic during the transition period between 197-80, and their effect on fertility becomes increasingly negative as the transition progresses. In an early transition stage, women's status variables and fertility show an ambiguous relationship. Variables such as education and interspousal age difference are related in the expected direction but weak with marital duration, fecundity, regulation costs, and deliberate fertility control. This occurs because fertility enhancing forces are stronger than fertility reducing ones. In late transition, the results are dramatically different, i.e., the nest effect on fertility is -.55 for education and .30 for interspousal age differences.