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Detecting Deliberate Fertility Control in Pre-transitional Populations: Evidence from six German villages, 1766–1863

Mise en évidence d’un contrôle volontaire des naissances dans des populations pré-transitionnelles: Le cas de 6 villages allemands, 1766–1863

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Abstract

This article deals with the possible existence of deliberate fertility control before the fertility transition. The timing of the fertility response to economic stress, as measured by fluctuations in grain prices, is used as a measure of deliberate, but non-parity specific, control. Birth histories from six German villages (1766–1863), including information on occupation of the husband, are used together with community-wide grain price series in a micro-level event-history analysis. The results show a negative fertility response to grain prices both in the year immediately following the price change, and with a 1-year lag. The response was also highly different between socioeconomic groups, with the most pronounced effects among the unskilled laborers. Moreover, the response in this group was very rapid, already present 3–6 months after the price change. As all involuntary fertility responses to economic hardship (e.g., malnutrition, spousal separation, and spontaneous abortion) come with a considerable time lag, the existence of such a rapid response among the lower social groups suggests that individual agency (deliberate control) was an important aspect of reproductive behavior also before the fertility transition.

Résumé

Cet article s’intéresse à l’existence possible d’un contrôle volontaire des naissances avant la transition de la fécondité. Le calendrier de l’évolution de la fécondité en fonction de la tension économique, mesurée par les fluctuations du prix des céréales, est utilisé comme mesure de contrôle volontaire des naissances, mais non lié à la parité. Des histoires génésiques comprenant la catégorie professionnelle du père, provenant de six villages allemands (1766-1863), sont utilisées en association avec des séries temporelles des prix des céréales au niveau communautaire pour effectuer une analyse biographique au niveau individuel. Les résultats indiquent une évolution négative de la fécondité en fonction du prix des céréales, à la fois dans l’année qui suit le changement de prix et l’année d’après. Cette évolution était très variable en fonction du groupe social, avec un effet maximal parmi les travailleurs non qualifiés. De plus, la réaction dans ce dernier groupe était très rapide, car déjà visible 3 à 6 mois après le changement de prix. Sachant que toutes les modifications involontaires de fécondité face aux difficultés économiques (par exemple à la malnutrition, aux ruptures conjugales, et aux avortements spontanés) ne se produisent qu’après un délai très long, l’existence d’une réaction si rapide parmi les groupes sociaux les plus défavorisés laisse penser que l’initiative individuelle (contrôle volontaire) était déjà, avant la transition de la fécondité, un aspect important du comportement reproducteur.

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Notes

  1. However, based on literary evidence, Van de Walle (2000) and Van de Walle and Muhsam (1995) argued that these methods were practiced mainly outside marriage in the preindustrial period.

  2. Information about the collection and the characteristics of the Ortssippenbucher is provided in Chap. 2 of Knodel (1988). These data were digitized and archived by the Population Studies Center of the University of Michigan. On the website of the Population Studies Center it is possible to download further documentation: http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/dis/data/.

  3. The website of the History of Work Information System contains documentation, bibliography and information about both the historical international classification of occupations (HISCO) and the social class scheme HISCLASS: http://historyofwork.iisg.nl/index.php. The classification into HISCLASS was made using the recode job: hisco_hisclass12a_@.inc, May 2004, see http://historyofwork.iisg.nl/list_pub.php?categories=hisclass.

  4. Prices were collected by David Jacks and all data is available online at: http://www.sfu.ca/~djacks/data/prices/prices.html (see also Jacks 2004, 2005).

  5. The estimations were made using the ‘eha’ package in R, developed by Göran Broström at the Department of Statistics, Umeå University, specifically designed to estimate this kind of combined time-series and individual survival model. Previous analyses have shown that estimations assuming Gamma distributed frailty produce the same results (see Bengtsson and Dribe 2006).

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Acknowledgments

Financial support from the Linnaeus Centre for Economic Demography, Lund University is gratefully acknowledged.

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Dribe, M., Scalone, F. Detecting Deliberate Fertility Control in Pre-transitional Populations: Evidence from six German villages, 1766–1863. Eur J Population 26, 411–434 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-010-9208-8

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