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:
“The economic dependence of woman and her apparently indestructible illusion that marriage will release her from loneliness and work and worry are potent factors in immunizing her from common sense in dealing with men at work.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“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)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“I don’t know but a book in a man’s brain is better off than a book bound in calf—at any rate it is safer from criticism. And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel—you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety—& even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)