Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

Demographers have worked for decades to identify the conditions common to the final stages of the demographic transition. The most widely respected theoretical explanations of fertility decline focus on couples’ decisions about their family size, decisions presumed to be driven by distal factors in society that are usually socioeconomic in nature. The theoretical explanations generally overlook the many barriers preventing women from having fertility regulation methods and the information they need to manage whether or when to have a child. Many of these barriers are often ignored by policy makers, even though from the consumer perspective they may be virtually insurmountable. This paper suggests that an opportunity model, which could also be viewed as an adjustment to existing theory, may provide a plausible explanation for the timing and pace of fertility decline. It proposes that what is often viewed as latent desire by women to control their fertility, ascribed to those women who used contraception or desired a smaller family size in the absence of the normally expected distal factors, may be simply a shift in the results of their implicit cost-benefit analyses. Women’s success in managing their childbearing appears to be largely dependent on their opportunities. In recognizing women’s rational reasoning based on the information they have available, from a policy perspective it is important to ensure that the barriers to the correct information and the technologies they need are reduced, as called for in ICPD. With this perspective, we can see that average family size can decline, and often has declined, by purely voluntary means, within a human rights framework.