Factors Affecting Birth Rate
- Government population policy, such as pronatalist or antinatalist policies (for instance, a tax on childlessness
- Availability of family planning services, such as birth control and sex education
- Availability and safety of abortion and the safety of childbirth
- Infant mortality rate: A family may have more children if a country's infant mortality rate is high, since it is likely some of those children will die.
- Existing age-sex structure
- Typical age of marriage
- Social and religious beliefs, especially in relation to contraception and abortion
- Industrialization: In a preindustrial agrarian economy, unskilled (or semiskilled) manual labor was needed for production; children can be viewed as an economic resource in developing countries, since they can earn money. As people require more training, parents tend to have fewer children and invest more resources in each child; the higher the level of technology, the lower the birth rate (the demographic-economic paradox).
- Economic prosperity or economic difficulty: In difficult economic times, couples delay (or decrease) childbearing.
- Poverty levels
- Urbanization
- Pension availability
- Conflict
- Illiteracy and unemployment
Read more about this topic: Birth Rate
Famous quotes containing the words factors, affecting, birth and/or rate:
“I always knew I wanted to be somebody. I think that’s where it begins. People decide, “I want to be somebody. I want to make a contribution. I want to leave my mark here.” Then different factors contribute to how you will do that.”
—Faith Ringgold (b. 1934)
“I know no more affecting lesson to our busy, plotting New England brains, than to go into one of our factories with which we have lined all the watercourses in the States. A man hardly knows how much he is a machine, until he begins to make telegraph, loom, press, and locomotive, in his own image.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The warped, distorted frame we have put around every Negro child from birth is around every white child also. Each is on a different side of the frame but each is pinioned there. And ... what cruelly shapes and cripples the personality of one is as cruelly shaping and crippling the personality of the other.”
—Lillian Smith (1897–1966)
“If I die prematurely at any rate I shall be saved from being bored to death at my own success.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)