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Spacing, Stopping, or Postponing? Fertility Desires in a Sub-Saharan Setting

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Demography

Abstract

A growing body of research has argued that the traditional categories of stopping and spacing are insufficient to understand why individuals want to control fertility. In a series of articles, Timæus, Moultrie, and colleagues defined a third type of fertility motivation—postponement—that reflects a desire to avoid childbearing in the short term without clear goals for long-term fertility. Although postponement is fundamentally a description of fertility desires, existing quantitative research has primarily studied fertility behavior in an effort to find evidence for the model. In this study, we use longitudinal survey data to consider whether postponement can be identified in standard measures of fertility desires among reproductive-age women in rural Mozambique. Findings show strong evidence for a postponement mindset in this population, but postponement coexists with stopping and spacing goals. We reflect on the difference between birth spacing and postponement and consider whether and how postponement is a distinctive sub-Saharan phenomenon.

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Notes

  1. The qualitative scholarship that Timæus, Moultrie, and colleagues drew on used a range of terms to describe the phenomenon, such as waiting (Agadjanian 2005) or pausing (Bledsoe et al. 1994). As Timæus and Moultrie (2008) noted, the term postponement has been widely used in research on low-fertility contexts to describe decisions to delay a first birth until some unspecified appropriate time (e.g., Berrington 2004; Sobotka 2004).

  2. Timæus and Moultrie articulated a clear conceptual distinction between spacing and postponement but acknowledged that in practice, the differences may not be so clear. Agadjanian (2005) suggested that over time, desires to space may evolve into more open-ended goals to wait and, eventually, into stopping behavior.

  3. Some of the original respondents who were replaced from the refresher sample were then located and interviewed in follow-up data collection efforts. Because the original and the refresher sample respondents were both retained, the total sample size increased in each subsequent wave.

  4. In theory, women who experienced marital dissolution after Wave 1 could have married by Wave 2. In practice, no remarriages occurred during this three-year time frame.

  5. Ryder (1973:502) took this suggestion to its logical extreme by noting that the only decision couples have to make about fertility is “whether to permit the next ovulation to come to fruition.”

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Acknowledgments

The data used in this analysis were collected with support from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development (Grants R21HD048257, R01HD058365; Agadjanian, PI). This research was also supported in part by Ohio State University’s Institute for Population Research (P2C-HD058484). Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Carolina Population Center, the Institut national d’études démographiques, and the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University. The authors thank participants and discussants at these seminars for helpful comments.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Ohio State University, 238 Townshend Hall, 1885 Neil Avenue Mall, Columbus, OH, 43210-1404, USA

    Sarah R. Hayford

  2. Department of Sociology, University of California–Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1551, USA

    Victor Agadjanian

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  1. Sarah R. Hayford
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  2. Victor Agadjanian
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Correspondence to Sarah R. Hayford.

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Hayford, S.R., Agadjanian, V. Spacing, Stopping, or Postponing? Fertility Desires in a Sub-Saharan Setting. Demography 56, 573–594 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0754-8

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