The Relation Between War, Starvation, and Fertility Ideals in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Life History Perspective

Abstract

In this article, we examine the relations between extreme environmental harshness during childhood and personal fertility ideals in African students. The study is informed by biological models of predictive adaptive responses (PAR) for individual reproductive schedules in the context of life history theory (LHT). Following theoretical models of external and internal environmental cues, we tested whether war and starvation during childhood differentially predict African students' personal fertility ideals in terms of their desired number of children and their desired age of first parenthood. The data were collected in eight different countries from sub-Saharan Africa with an overall sample size of N = 392. Standardized effect estimates were obtained using a Bayesian approach. The results suggest that war and starvation are predictive of the desired number of children, but not of the desired age of first parenthood. Moreover, the effect estimates varied considerably between females and males, indicating possible interactions between the two independent variables depending on the students' sex. Furthermore, we found a small negative correlation between the desired number of children and the desired age of first parenthood, providing only weak support for a clustering of the two variables on a slow-fast continuum. The results are discussed in light of current models of individual life histories in humans.

Keywords: human development; life history theory; personal fertility ideals; predictive adaptive response.

Figure 1.

Effect size plots from Bayesian regression models for desired number of children and ideal age of first parenthood. White circles indicate the median; the boxes indicate the inter-quartile-range; and the whiskers indicate the 5th and 95th percentiles of the posterior predictive distributions for each parameter.