Babies and Poverty

August 9, 2008

I was doing some research at JSTOR for some papers when I saw this beautiful, concise and decisive summary on why poor people bear more babies:

 

The Poverty-Demography Trap

 The link between extreme poverty and high fertility is strong for several interconnected reasons: * Infant mortality rates are high when there are inadequate health services, so high fertility provides “insurance” for a surviving child.

* Children are often perceived as economic assets who provide supplementary labor for the household, especially in rural areas.

* Poor and illiterate women have few job opportunities away from the farm, and so place a low value on the opportunity (time) costs of raising children.

* Poor families in poor communities are less likely to be aware of changes in mortality and in employment opportunities for the educated and thus miss signals of the benefits of investing in child quality rather than quantity.

* Women are frequently unaware of their reproductive rights (including the right to plan their families) and lack access to reproductive health information, services, and facilities, leading to high rates of unmet demand for contraception in low-income countries and among poorer members of all developing countries.

* Poor households lack the income to purchase contraceptives and family planning services. Governments lack the resources to provide extensive access to reproductive health services and counseling.

Because of these multiple channels linking poverty and high fertility, an effective voluntary approach to reducing fertility rates should focus on several policy fronts:

* Investing in child survival to give parents the confidence to have fewer children.

* Investing in rural infrastructure (water, cooking fuels, roads) so that children can go to school rather than spend their days collecting water and fuelwood.

* Empowering women with skills, literacy, numeracy, and economic rights to engage in off-farm employment.

* Empowering women to gain access to family planning services and modern forms of contraception, including eliminating information gaps and provider biases (based on wealth, ethnicity, or age) that restrict use.

* Making contraceptive services available free to low-income households.

* Investing in comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services as part of scaling up public health facilities and services. 

 

Support the Reproductive Health Bill! 

 

Source:

Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Studies in Family Planning, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Jun., 2005), pp. 145-147