From Death to Birth Mortality Decline and Reproductive Change (1998) / Chapter Skim
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7 The Relationship Between Infant and Child Mortality and Fertility: Some Historical and Contemporary Evidence for the United States
7 The Relationship Between Infant and Child Mortality and Fertility: Some Historical and Contemporary Evidence for the United States
Pages 227-253
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From page 227... ...
Much of the recent interest has centered on the following questions: Might exogenously caused declines in infant and child death rates induce partially or wholly offsetting declines in birth rates? Or will mortality-reducing programs, valuable in and of themselves, simply exacerbate already high rates of population growth?
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From page 228... ...
(1992) looked at the reasons why high fertility rates may have resulted in high infant mortality rates for the western United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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From page 229... ...
No tabulations were presented, however, on differences in birth intervals for breastfeeding versus artificial feeding, so it is not possible to see the joint association with fertility. A more recent set of matched birth and death records (from the National Infant Mortality Survey of 1964-1966)
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From page 230... ...
230 SOME HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY EVIDENCE FOR THE UNITED STATES TABLE 7-1 Mortality Analysis, Eight American Cities, 1911-1915 Panel A: Infant Mortality by Birth Order Eliminating Influence of Mother's Age Infant Ratio Ratio Mortality to ActualExpected Actual/ Birth Order Rate Average DeathsDeaths Expected 1 104.6 94.1 652704.1 92.7 2 95.7 86.1 474538.6 88.0 3 104.6 94.1 348356.8 97.6 4 108.8 97.8 270266.5 101.2 5 118.8 106.8 210192.7 109.0 6 122.7 110.3 155141.2 109.7 7 136.8 123.0 126106.2 118.4 8 135.9 122.2 9279.9 115.2 9 146.8 132.0 6957.3 120.2 10 and over 181.5 163.2 159112.0 142.0 'otal 111.2 100.0 25552555.3 100.0 Panel B: Birth Interval since Preceding Birth (Baltimore only) Birth Order/ Infant Ratio Interval Mortality to Length Rate Average Birth order First birth 94.8 91.6 Second and later 106.6 103.0 Interval length 1 year 146.7 141.7 2 years 98.6 95.3 3 years 86.5 83.6 4+ years 84.9 82.0 Total 103.5 100.0
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From page 231... ...
As can be seen in Table 7-2, these results point to a consistent decline in fertility from at least 1800, as measured by child/woman ratios or by crude birth rates or total fertility rates derived from them. Unfortunately, collection of vital statistics was left to individual states and municipalities, which resulted in tardy and uneven coverage.
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From page 232... ...
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From page 234... ...
If the relationship were from fertility to infant mortality and if infant mortality were mostly subject to exogenous environmental influences (e.g., summer gastrointestinal infections and winter respiratory infections) , then the reduced birth ratios would have had only a damped effect on infant and child mortality.
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From page 235... ...
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From page 236... ...
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From page 238... ...
One interpretation is that further fertility declines awaited declines in infant mortality, but the birth rate then remained quite steady from the 1890s until the early 1920s, at which point fertility recommenced its decline until World War II. In the meantime, the infant mortality rate continued to be reduced steadily from the 1890s through the baby boom until 1960.
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From page 239... ...
SOURCE: State and federal censuses; state and federal vital statistics publications. Similarly, the simple correlations between the infant mortality rate and the general fertility rate for the states of the Birth Registration Area of the United States in the twentieth century are -0.3315 (1915)
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From page 240... ...
Some tabulations of the child mortality index by marriage duration, woman's age, and parity are given in Table 7-4. The results are presented for the total and for white and black populations.
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From page 241... ...
Nonetheless, introducing these variables, as well as a dummy variable for race, did reveal that the curvilinear pattern of child mortality with age persisted and had the correct orientation (convex from below)
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From page 242... ...
EVIDENCE FOR THE EFFECT OF INFANT AND CHILD MORTALITY ON FERTILITY The public use micro samples of 1900 and 1910 also afford the possibility of examining the interesting and pertinent opposite causal path: the replacement and hoarding effects. How extensively do couples replace an actual infant or child death with a new birth?
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From page 243... ...
The basic correction uses the observed child mortality rate and the mean and variance of the birth distribution (which can be calculated from the data) to estimate a "true" replacement coefficient (t')
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From page 244... ...
is a measure of the correlation between fertility and child mortality and hence the extent to which high infant and child death rates could induce higher birth rates, that is, hoarding. The assumption is that couples are aware of the ambient child mortality rates.
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From page 245... ...
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From page 246... ...
The other independent variables show that urban residence and living in the Northeast were associated with lower fertility and that higher proportions of nonwhite and foreign born as well as residence in the South were related to higher birth rates. The final set of regressions repeats this exercise for the towns of Massachusetts in 1860 and 1885 and for the 54 largest cities in 1915.
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From page 247... ...
Finally, the lagged specification also exhibited a positive and significant effect of infant death rates on birth rates in 1915, although both the contemporaneous specifications yielded insignificant though positive effects. Overall, these macro-level results support the idea that infant mortality did affect birth rates in the expected direction.
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From page 250... ...
Reductions in infant and child mortality, such as were occurring in the twentieth century, would thus have had a direct offset in reduced birth rates by about 25 percent. But there would have likely been another indirect offset of up to 50 percent if hoarding declined over time when parents gained greater assurance of child survival.
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From page 251... ...
Feldman 1973 Infant Mortality Rates: Relationship with Mother's Reproductive History, United States. National Center for Health Statistics.
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From page 252... ...
Haines 1991 Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late Nineteenth Century America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
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From page 253... ...
1962 Birth Rates of the White Population of the United States, 1800-1860: An Economic Analysis. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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