Wanted/unwanted children and social norms, and what about the men?

Wanted/unwanted children and social norms, and what about the men?

by Carolyn Hughes -

I'm finding the wanted/unwanted children topic to be so interesting. Bongaarts' mention that "the convergence of wanted fertility is in part attributable to diffusion and social interaction processes", whereby social norms and the influences of others drive people's ideas of how many children they do or do not want. Perhaps this was obvious to everyone else, but I'm thinking about how the concept of "unwanted" children is somewhat new, was borne (or at least made more popular) from the study of demography and the broad availability of contraceptives, and how influenced it is by societies and norms. For example, how much of people's responses to the wanted/unwanted questions are based on what they themselves truly would want if there were no other/outside influences, versus how much the response is informed by perceived social pressures and norms? Forgive the musing here, but I used to think of "unwanted" fertility as mostly being related to an unmet need for contraception or lack of access to abortion (it often is), and I was thinking less about the social influence side that can put stigma (or other negative pressure) around having a lot of children. 

On a different note... As countries continue through the transition, I'm wondering if we'll start measuring wanted, unwanted, and wanted-but-not-realized fertility, wherein we take infertility (which is increasing) into account. Maybe that's already being done. Granted, demography is much more about counting people who do/did exist, but as concerns about population decline increase, I wonder if it would be relevant. Similarly, Germany's fertility rate is increasing for the first time since the 1970s, and it has been attributed at least in part due to their very robust family leave policies. It seems like people perhaps want(ed) to have more children, but issues of leave, childcare, etc. made having more children undesirable. 

Lastly, while I love the focus on women's access to contraceptives and abortion, and the association between girls'/women's access to education and fertility (which was my gripe with one of last week's readings), I'm wondering where the men are in all of this (other than as lead authors of many of the older articles). It looks like DHS asks similar questions of men; are there studies that look just at men or men and women as individual and then combined units? I will look into this; it would be interesting to see how increased access to education among women may change men's ideas on wanted/unwanted fertility. 

Sidenote/question for Nadia -- the DHS information and questionnaire brings up a question: It looks like the fertility preference questions are asked of married women (and married men); are unmarried people not counted in these questions/statistics? Maybe I'm just misreading/misinterpreting things. 

Re: Wanted/unwanted children and social norms, and what about the men?

by Nadia Diamond-Smith -
Yes, you are right-- not all DHS even ask questions from unmarried women, and even where they do, not all questions are asked to unmarried women. However, I do think that in recent years data is collected from unmarried women too, see this report which has some interesting findings and also talks about history a bit
https://dhsprogram.com/pubs/pdf/CR34/CR34.pdf

And yes-- there has been more realization of the need to ask men questions and try to think about men's needs and preferences. One thing I have found in my work and been trying to address is that we often criticize men for not being supportive or being barriers to all sorts of things related to reproductive and maternal/women's health, however, often no one has ever talked to them about these things or bothered to give them information that would help them be able to support their partners, access care, etc. It seems unfair to label men as barriers when actually no one has ever tried to engage/educate them.

Re: Wanted/unwanted children and social norms, and what about the men?

by Priz Espinosa Tamez -
I think it would be interesting to evaluate men's perceptions about family planning and reproductive health (in populations that usually are opposed to using contraception). I understand and agree that it can be unfair to automatically label all men as barriers. However, in my experience (which I know is not representative of all Mexico) I would feel that in some situations I would be leaving women vulnerable if their partners were in the room when as physicians we explain contraceptive methods. There a lot of gender issues and in some cases women don't want to get pregnant anymore but they are afraid that their partner will find out and that will have economic/physical/emotional consequences. Of course this is not all women, but I would be concerned about this population, since I think changing this way of thinking that has been part of a normalized cultural behavior could take a generation/generations to change. I wonder what approaches could be used in this populations so they are not left vulnerable, but we also engage men.

Re: Wanted/unwanted children and social norms, and what about the men?

by Leah Koenig -
Carolyn, I think the idea of considering "wanted-but-not-realized" fertility together with wanted and unwanted/unintended fertility is really interesting. This would be more of a "life course" perspective on fertility and would provide information about people's fertility trajectories (e.g. an individual could experience an unwanted/unintended pregnancy and then go on to have wanted-but-not-realized fertility). I've seen this measured on an aggregate level (as a gap between the number of desired and actual children on a national level), but not on an individual level. I'm curious if there are studies that measure a reproductive life course calendar, akin to the DHS's contraceptive calendar.