The Enduring Case for Fertility Desires
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The Enduring Case for Fertility Desires Sara Yeatman 1,2 & Jenny Trinitapoli 3 & Sarah Garver 3 # Population Association of America 2020
Abstract Persistently high levels of unintended fertility, combined with evidence that over- and underachieved fertility are typical and not exceptional, have prompted researchers to question the utility of fertility desires writ large. In this study, we elaborate this paradox: widespread unintendedness and meaningful, highly predictive fertility desires can and do coexist. Using data from Malawi, we demonstrate the predictive validity of numeric fertility timing desires over both four-month and one-year periods. We find that fertility timing desires are highly predictive of pregnancy and that they follow a gradient wherein the likelihood of pregnancy decreases in correspondence with desired time to next birth. This finding holds despite the simultaneous observation of high levels of unintended pregnancy in our sample. Discordance between desires and behaviors reflects constraints to achieving one’s fertility and the fluidity of desires but not their irrelevance. Fertility desires remain an essential—if sometimes blunt—tool in the demographers’ toolkit. Keywords Fertility . Fertility desires . Malawi
Introduction Fertility scholars tend to treat fertility desires1 as instructive tools for understanding fertility trends broadly, but they disagree about how seriously desires should be taken 1 We refer to desires throughout the text despite frequently citing literature that uses the language of “intentions.” Although some surveys actually measure intentions, it is far more common for surveys (e.g., NSFG, DHS, PRAMS) to measure desires (e.g., “Did you yourself want to have a(nother) baby?”; “How long would you like to wait before the birth of a(nother) child?”). Responding to calls from fertility researchers, we endeavor to align our terminology with our measurement (Kost and Zolna 2019; Kost et al. 2018; Miller et al. 2004).
* Sara Yeatman [email protected]
1
Department of Health and Behavioral Sciences, University of Colorado Denver, Campus Box 188, PO Box 173364, Denver, CO 80217, USA
2
University of Colorado Population Center, Boulder, CO, USA
3
Sociology Department, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
S. Yeatman et al.
as predictors of fertility behaviors at the individual level (Bongaarts 1992; Cleland et al. 2019; Morgan 2001; Ní Bhrolcháin and Beaujouan 2019; Schoen et al. 2000).2 High levels of unintended fertility and the so-called unmet need for family planning despite expanded access (Bearak et al. 2018; Kuang and Brodsky 2016) are being read in support of claims that fertility desires themselves may be so problematic as to lack predictive validity (Aiken et al. 2016; Machiyama et al. 2017; Morgan and Bachrach 2011; Rocca et al. 2019; Sable 1999). Despite growing criticism of fertility desires, survey items about desired number of children and desired timing to next birth remain cornerstones of fertility research. The critiques of fertility desires
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