Social Dynamics of Adolescent Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa (1993) / Chapter Skim
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8 CONCLUSIONS
8 CONCLUSIONS
Pages 168-177
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From page 168... ...
If, as is usually the case, unmarried teenagers are less sexually active than those who are married, sexual activity in the teenage population may actually be declining. Substantial changes in several domains, however, bear strongly on the circumstances in which adolescent fertility occurs, influencing not only its actual rates but also, most certainly, its consequences.
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From page 169... ...
Numerous ethnographic studies suggest that certain kinds of sexual expression by adolescents may have been more freely tolerated in the past than they are in Western societies; but sexuality was regulated closely by adults, who sought to maintain sharp boundaries between casual sex and reproduction among adolescents. Chapter 4 shows that in most African societies two other criteria are more important than marriage in establishing sanctioned contexts for childbearing: whether a man assumes paternal responsibility, and whether the young parents have prepared themselves for reproduction through undergoing a carefully structured series of rituals or periods of learning.
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From page 170... ...
Although rising educational achievements are associated with rising premarital sex, we were not persuaded by widespread arguments that schooling or even the school context increases promiscuity by eroding societal mores. Desires to continue schooling effectively lengthen the gap between menarche and childbearing; but school policies of expelling girls for pregnancy are devised and enforced for the explicit purpose of discouraging early pregnancy.
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From page 171... ...
In countries where their labor is central to agriculture the majority of sub-Saharan African countries women make a very early start in the labor force and childbearing begins shortly thereafter. In economies where women's occupations are more varied, especially the West African trading economies, the need to prepare for complex commercial tasks and to create viable business relationships makes women delay both work and childbearing.
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From page 172... ...
Although there is virtually no systematic research on this issue, cultural logic suggests that a child's status is determined as much by the father's potential tradeoffs in the realm of training and education as by those of the mother. Chapter 7 attempts to assess the risks and consequences of adolescent fertility, concentrating on topics on which there is the most research: health risks.
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From page 173... ...
The children of very young mothers also suffer heightened risks of mortality and the major health risks of low birthweight. To be sure, in countries where marriage and childbearing begin early, the children of very young women have suffered disproportionate risks for some time.
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From page 174... ...
Although neither the Demographic and Health Surveys nor the World Fertility Surveys asked this very simple current-status question or the more complex one about when schooling ended, the data they generate can support analysis of current-status variables pertaining to adolescent fertility. Less easily resolved is the question of how much, compared with other factors, fertility contributes to women dropping out of school.
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From page 175... ...
has speculated, small businesses absorb increasing numbers of young people whom the formal sector cannot support. If small and informal businesses proliferate, and if young women delay fertility as they pursue business training, then we may see very little change in fertility levels, even if levels of formal education decline.
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From page 176... ...
At the same time, strong evidence indicates that society has a powerful effect on the opportunities and responsibilities that determine when conjugal life and childbearing begin for adolescents as well as on how their pregnancies are received. Because society has such powers whether expressed as diffuse values or as clear directives in discrete situations adolescents exercise less control over their own reproduction than fertility surveys directed at women aged 15 and over typically assume.
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From page 177... ...
Where ages at marriage and levels of education are rising, and where fertility among adolescents as a whole may even be falling, these very rises in social aspirations foster resentment when opportunities are lost through pregnancies. Therefore, although modernity produces the wonders of formal schooling, contraceptive methods that can delay motherhood, and hospitals that treat emergency abortions and low-birthweight babies, it has equally sharpened public antipathy toward adolescent fertility.
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