Social Dynamics of Adolescent Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa (1993) / Chapter Skim
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1 INTRODUCTION
1 INTRODUCTION
Pages 5-15
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From page 5... ...
. Besides posing challenges to society as a whole, adolescent fertility can have lasting and potentially devastating effects on adolescents themselves.
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From page 6... ...
-- - r - -- -- -ale Related to this first point is the second: Because children are highly valued and because most childbearing occurs within marriage, most adolescent childbearing in Africa is not only quite normal; it is strongly desired. DHS results leave little doubt that among married teens, the overwhelming majority of first births have been intended and wanted.
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From page 7... ...
It remains unclear, of course, whether African adolescents will be the wave of a contracepting future for all age groups, or are simply temporary members of an age group that increasingly will delay childbearing. In any case, the topic of adolescent fertility needs to be placed into a wider perspective that attempts to capture the enormous heterogeneity in economic regimes and social life within the region, a heterogeneity that generates very different reactions to early childbearing.
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From page 8... ...
Such problems may include low birthweight among infants, delayed or obstructed labor, ruptures in the birth canal, or death to the mother or child, or both. It is much easier to chart changes in the second configuration, one of increasing prevalence in the subcontinent, which involves unmarried adolescents.
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From page 9... ...
Before we begin, it is useful to clarify the assumptions that underlie our analysis and that guide our interpretations of the data. Much of the scholarship of previous eras assumed that Western forms of knowledge and technological innovations would inevitably supplant in Such assumptions lay behind the urgent calls to anthropologists by Franz Boas and his student Margaret Mead to launch ethnographic expeditions to describe "traditional" cultures before they were lost beneath the crushing tide of modernization.
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From page 10... ...
on the duration of "maidenhood"; and it has been used more recently by the Caldwells with respect to the focus of African values surrounding reproduction and social life on the ways of ancestors (Caldwell and Caldwell, 1987~. But it figures implicitly whenever cultural explanations that is, those that rest on persistent, profound, even unconscious elements of sexuality and reproduction are invoked, such as polygyny, the positive valuation of sexuality, marriage as a process rather than as an event, and the enormous importance of ancestral lines of descent.
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From page 11... ...
This research strategy makes some assumptions that are particularly risky because African economic life has been fundamentally reoriented over the course of the twentieth century by religious conversion, labor migration, female literacy, and other twentieth-century phenomena. Still, in trying to understand adolescent reproductive behavior, we find some important pieces of support for Lesthaeghe's general idea that many of the practices and values of precolonial society figure strongly in current patterns.
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From page 12... ...
Although social influences constitute formidable pressures in both contexts, their results are entirely different. The problems a pregnant urban schoolgirl confronts arise not because society is indifferent to her pregnancy, but because society condemns it, viewing early childbearing among unmarried schoolgirls as a painful wound in the social fabric.
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From page 13... ...
It also attempts to describe some consequences of adolescent fertility. Chapter 2 presents recent data, primarily from the Demographic and Health Surveys, that describe some contemporary patterns in adolescent fertility, and outlines trends by comparing current patterns to those from a generation ago.
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From page 14... ...
By drawing inferences from two disparate kinds of data, nationallevel statistical studies of economic patterns and microlevel qualitative studies, we show that economic opportunities for women in the wider society open other forms of training that may affect fertility in ways that parallel the effects of formal schooling. Chapter 7 attempts to assess the risks and consequences of adolescent fertility.
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From page 15... ...
What do adolescent women gain by becoming pregnant, and how do the possible benefits compare to the costs? We conclude that the physiological problems of early childbearing most often occur in rural areas where health care is least able to cope with the needs of adolescents; by contrast, in urban areas with better health care facilities, social condemnation for what is now perceived as an inappropriate pregnancy often prevents young women from seeking assistance and, moreover, pressures them to take health risks.
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