Malcolm Potts

Sex and the Birth Rate: Human Biology, Demographic Change, and Access to Fertility Regulation Methods

1. The Main Idea

What determines the fertility change has been the topic of foremost concern throughout the history of the discipline of demography, and different authors have given different explanations as to what alters the fertility rate of a society: For instance, the demographic transition theory focusing on the effects of modernization and economic development as the prerequisite for fertility reduction is one of them. Other authors (like Lesthaeghe and Cleland and Wilson) have asserted that cultural and ideational, rather than the structural and economic, changes are crucial in reducing the fertility rate. Still other authors claim that it is the proximate determinants- i.e., access to birth control in this context - which are most crucial in fertility reduction. This article by Pitts is in the last group, and its central point is that access to easy and effective contraception and abortion is the crucial factor in reducing the fertility rate of any society, regardless of the stage of economic development it may be in. In fact, Pitts goes far enough to make a claim that institutionalizing universal access to effective means of birth control should be a foremost policy concern of all nations of the world.

2. The Starting Assumption

The implicitly stated assumption this article makes is that human beings tend to have more children than necessary - that is, the replacement level fertility - if the process of sex and reproduction is left uncontrolled by some means of birth control. This assumption is based on the ideas borrowed from evolutionary biology. Specifically, Pitts notes that there are three assumptions (p. 5) that can be extracted from the biological perspective on human reproductive behavior. First, we are genetically predisposed to seek and have sex, more so than necessary for the "original" purpose of it which is the reproduction. Second, we are genetically predisposed to cherish and support our own children if they arrive (This is clearly untrue for some child abusers, but on the whole let's accept it as basically solid). Third, we are genetically predisposed to be socially and sexually competitive (from an anthropological perspective, I would imagine that this assumption is rather dubious empirically). Further, it is assumed that humans have no predispositions toward having certain specific number of children, large or small. Instead, Pitts argues that it is an empirically validated fact that humans tend to put material self-interest in front of the higher fertility level once they attain certain level of material and economic well-being. Though not all of these assumptions seem to be rock solid in validity (especially the third one that attributes socially competitive behavior to genetic predispositions), anyway together they combine to lead to the assumption that when left uncontrolled, then human fertility level tends to be rather high. This is an important logical move, for if fertility is predisposed to be very high then naturally it follows that the crucial determinant of the fertility level is the means to be able to control that fertility.

3. Empirical Support

On the whole empirical support to the main argument that birth control is the principal factor in fertility reduction is more convincing than the assumptions of human fertility behavior he deduces out of the evolutionary biology. For instance, Pitts categorizes countries according to whether they have "constrained" or "unconstrained" access to contraception and abortion (See p. 8 for the definition). The data shows that all countries with nationwide unconstrained access to fertility regulation have a total fertility rate of 2.0 or less, while all countries with higher-than the replacement level fertility have constrained access to fertility regulation methods. Even more importantly, from the data that shows the fertility trend of various nations in 30 years from 1960 to 90, nations with low socioeconomic development level nevertheless achieved a low-level fertility so long as they provided for the unconstrained access to fertility regulation, while those with high socioeconomic development level but poor services in fertility regulation showed very little fertility reduction. This is important because it is a very effective support for the argument that access to birth control is more important factor in determining fertility level than the economic development, as claimed by the orthodox demographic transition theorists.

4. Relevance, Critique, Cautionary Remark

On the whole, this is an effective article with reasonable empirical support to debunk the orthodox demographic transition theory that posits economic development and subsequent change in the "demand" for children among the people in the developing nations as prerequisites for effective fertility reduction. Instead, the article acts as a nice complement to others making a similar claim, for instance Cleland and Wilson that also posit attitude toward birth control as one of the crucial determinant in fertility reduction. In general, combining this article with other authors as Lesthaeghe, Bergstrom, and Cleland and Wilson, it appears that we may now be able to conclude that the traditional demographic transition theory that asserts for the strict association between economic development and fertility has serious weaknesses in light of empirical data. On the other hand, the relationship between this article and the cultural explanation of fertility change is more complicated. We have seen that the authors as Cherlin (in the family section) make a claim that birth control have little direct influence in changing the fertility rate. However, it is rather difficult to make a direct comparison between Pitts' proposition having fertility regulation as the central factor in fertility change and the cultural explanation as they operate on different levels of the analysis. Fertility regulation, in the form of contraception and abortion is strictly the proximate determinants of fertility, in the sense that they directly effect the fertility level. Cultural factors, on the other hand, are not the proximate determinants but rather are mechanisms that operate upon the proximate determinants as contraception and abortion. So, as also mentioned by Morgan, it appears that we now need more researches investigating the exact relationship between cultural, social forces and the proximate determinants of fertility.