RESUMO
Census data were examined for Puerto Rico and Jamaica in an attempt to deal with the question of a relation between consensual unions and fertility in Latin America. The Puerto Rican women were found to be much more prolific than the Jamaican women. They began reproduction earlier and continued reproduction at higher rates. However, the fertility of single Jamaican women is higher than that of single Puerto Ricans; the fertility of married Jamaicans is only slightly lower, while the fertility of the consensually married is much lower. It appears that the common law union in Jamaica is less stable than in Puerto Rico. The high incidence of single and consensually mated women in Jamaica is largely responsible for the lower rates of birth. In contrast to the Jamaican women, Puerto Rican women in consensual unions show higher fertility than married women, the relationship decreasing with age. Consensual unions may be the result of accidental pregnancies more frequently than are marriages, but in time the more fertile unions may be legalized. However, the fertility differentials by marital status are particularly marked among the urban, working, and better educated women
Assuntos
Humanos , Adulto , Feminino , Casamento , Taxa de Fecundidade , Fatores Socioeconômicos , JamaicaRESUMO
Two major investigations concerning fertility control among lower income classes have been conducted in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and in Jamaica during the past 10 years. In Puerto Rico 72 rural and urban couples, and in Jamaica 99 rural and urban wives and a subsample of 53 husbands were given unstructured interviews. Based on results from the pilot investigations, larger-scale sample surveys were conducted, using shorter interviews with questions more amendable to statistical analysis. In Jamaica area probability sample of 1400 currently mated urban and rural women was employed. In Puerto Rico a similar representative sample of the island's household heads was employed for questions on knowledge and use of birth control; the interview proper was adminstered to 888 wives and 322 husbands, drawn from the outpatient case loads of health centers and prematernal clinics. In order to determine whether educational methods can affect knowledge, attitudes, and behavior in the area of family planning, experimental designs were set up. Finally, the island of Haiti was selected for pilot investigation in order to establish a kind of baseline. On the basis of the various studies, 3 necessary and 3 facilitating conditions for effective fertility control can be drawn up. The necessary conditions are 1) ends or values which explicitly favor a family size less than is normally achieved without control, 2) awareness of the means of achieving family limitation, and 3) acceptability of the known means. The 3 facilitating conditions are distribution of means, social organization, and salience. In Jamaica, in the light of the inadequacy of knowledge, poor family organization, and low salience of family limitation, it is no surprise that only 7 percent of the rural and 17 percent of the urban women have ever tried a birth control method. In Puerto Rico despite a desire for small families, relatively good knowledge of methods, variable attitudes, and an excellent public system of clinics, family limitations has not become popular in the same sense as in modern industrial societies. (AU)
Assuntos
Humanos , Adulto , Feminino , Taxa de Fecundidade , Região do Caribe , Serviços de Planejamento Familiar , Fatores Socioeconômicos , Jamaica , Porto RicoRESUMO
To determine whether the pattern of marital relationships might be related to attitudes towards behavior bearing on fertility, 75 urban women from three categories of marital status and 3 categories of fertility were interviewed. Visiting relations are characterized by relatively infrequent sexual relations, particularly when the respondent is living with parents or parental surrogates. The 2nd visiting relationship shows a pattern of increased sexual frequency even with the same living relation arrangments. 22 percent of the 1st visiting relations of women reported, frequent higher than 1/week compared with 26 percent for the 2nd. Visitng relationships involve erratic patterns of sexual union with frequent periods of separation of the partners. In common law and marriage compared with the earlier visiting arrangments frequency and regularity increased. The low fertility of these women may be explained by the high proportion of mating experience spent in visiting relationships, periods of nonexposure between unions particularly during their most fertile years. In common law and marriage, respondents felt positive incentives to reproduction (AU)