With Regard to Our Recent Work on Population and Birth Rates....

Brazilian Women’s Power Leads to Falling Birth Rate

   

From Houghton-Mifflin's Current Events Site: (http://hmcurrentevents.com/brazilian-womens-power-leads-to-falling-birth-rate/ )

Population reports don’t usually hold many surprises. But the news about Brazil’s plummeting fertility rate is astounding. A few decades ago, the rate was 5.3 children per woman; today, it is about 1.9. Experts predict the rate will be 1.5 children per woman by 2030.

How did this happen? There is no one reason. Instead, a combination of causes has led women of all social classes to challenge tradition and limit the size of their families. Brazil’s booming economy is key to this development. Women have more opportunities for careers in the growing cities, where families don’t need numerous children to work as farmhands. Improved health care assures women they don’t need to have more babies to replace those that die. Advances in Brazil’s pension system assures parents they don’t have to depend on additional children to support them in their old age. Brazil’s women also have plenty of role models to inspire them to move away from the traditional role of motherhood and toward more independence. Brazil’s newly elected president is a woman, there are high-ranking female officers in the military, and special police stations are run for and by women.

One particularly interesting cause is called the “soap opera effect.” On a typical Brazilian soap opera, called a telenovella, 90 percent of the female characters have only one child or none. The women in the telenovellas lead more glamorous lives than their working- or middle-class viewers, who may equate such lifestyles with having fewer children. Script writers for these wildly popular dramas weren’t intentionally discouraging large families. Rather, they were criticizing the traditional values endorsed by the dictatorship that ruled Brazil until 1985. In the process, they may have helped empower Brazilian women, and the women are not looking back.

(This is a real life example of what we discussed last week!)