男孩偏好作为一种生育文化的生产与再生产

本文采用实践社会学视角,以吉登斯的结构化理论为基础,利用对一个亲属群体生育实践的访谈数据,从时空两个维度系统地分析了中国农村地区男孩偏好生育文化的生产与再生产机制,在此基础上还探讨了生育政策对男孩偏好文化再生产机制的影响,发现在生育政策背景下,部分农民因为偏离传统的例行性生育路径而陷入"生育困境",并从两个方面引发男孩偏好文化的生产与再生产:1.在生育困境的压力下,一些文化要素伴随生活事件不断的卷入生育实践之中,使得直接遭遇生育困境的行动者在日常生活的互动中领会到男孩的社会意义;2.亲属网络将所有亲属卷入到当事人的生育困境之中,从而引发出对生育实践的集体性反思。正是这些日常的生活事件与亲属网络使得男孩偏好文化在广泛的时空向度上延伸。     

Passport to Parenthood: Reproductive Pathways In and Out of Denmark

Denmark has become a destination for single women, lesbians, and heterosexual couples wanting donated sperm. At the moment, women from Sweden, Norway, Germany, Italy, and the UK travel to Denmark. Simultaneously, waiting lists for donated eggs and age restrictions are prime motivations for infertile Danish women and heterosexual couples to leave Denmark and travel to Spain, the Czech Republic, the Ukraine, and Greece for egg donation. Informed by Donna Haraway’s notion of “the apparatus of bodily production”, Marcia Inhorn’s development of “reproductive flows”, and the use of Adele Clarke’s “situational analysis”, this paper explores the question: How do global reproductive pathways in and out of Denmark emerge when fertility travellers narrate, negotiate, and cross national borders to go through fertility treatment? Methodologically, we use a multi-sited and multi-modal approach centring on interviews with fertility travellers moving to and from Denmark in combination with ethnographic observations carried out in Danish and Spanish fertility clinics and an analysis of legal regulations. The paper concludes by discussing how the concept of reproductive pathways helps to theorize transnational movements of bodies and contributes to feminist scholarship on transnational reproductive travel.     

Women's agency in Australia's first fertility transition: a debate revisited

The place of women's agency in the fertility transition of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century is a contested one. Some argue that the transition was achieved mainly through male methods of contraception. Others, including many arguing from an Australian perspective, contend that women's agency in fertility decline was significant. In this article, the authors revisit the issue of women's agency in Australia. Drawing on a range of archival sources and scholarship, they seek to demonstrate that women in Australia in the last quarter of the nineteenth century had access to contraception, albeit limited, and, where that failed, to abortion. The authors argue that the changing political and educational climate, which saw women gaining the vote in 1894 in South Australia and admission to secondary and higher education and paid work, provided the setting for women's changing status. Their increasing agency – an agency many women worked to secure – encouraged women to challenge many traditional practices.     

Family Formation in the Baltic Countries: A Transformation in the Legacy of state socialism

This article examines the transformation of nuptiality patterns in the Baltic countries since the late 1960s, in the context of long-term trends. The aim of the study is to compare the entry into first conjugal union in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and analyze the position of the Baltic countries in a broader European perspective. The analyses employ microdata from national surveys conducted in the framework of the European Family and Fertility Surveys program. Our main results on the timing and mode of union formation show that in Estonia and Latvia the shift from direct marriage to cohabitation started well before the fall of the state socialist regime, and followed a trajectory close to Scandinavian countries. In Lithuania, on the other hand, the change in the pattern of union formation has been much slower. The article discusses the factors underlying the observed similarities and dissimilarities in union formation.     

Marital fertility during the Korean demographic transition: child survival and birth spacing

In this paper, we examine marital fertility patterns during the demographic transition in Korea. The demographic transition was a fundamental transformation in human societies, and has been a key topic in demographic research. However, our understanding of the demographic transition in Korea is limited, largely due to a lack of adequate data. By using individual longitudinal data drawn from the population registers in a rural Korean village between 1920 and 1977, we attempt to contribute to this literature. We first discuss conceptual and data issues, and the historical context. We then test a key exposition of demographic transition theory: an improvement in child survival was a prerequisite for fertility decline. We find that: (1) an improvement in child survival was crucial for marital fertility changes across birth cohorts; (2) the relationship between child survival and marital fertility remained stable; (3) parity-specific fertility control emerged early and birth spacing became important later as ways of limiting marital fertility; and (4) the sex of the deceased offspring became important for marital fertility. The implications of these findings for the Korean demographic transition and future study topics are discussed.     

人口再生产价值视角的女性生育和劳动权益保障

近年来,我国生育政策进行了几次调整,体现了国家对人口再生产在社会发展中重要性的认同,但是生育率未能得到有效提升,而女性在劳动力市场遭受歧视的现象依然广泛存在.研究认为,生育与工作家庭的冲突是我国生育现状的主要影响因素,而"全面三孩"政策可能加剧这种冲突.研究建议:应以人口再生产与物质生产理论为基础,重新审视人口再生产在...     

Parenthood,child-rearing and fertility in England, 1850–1914

Fertility declines across Europe and the Anglo-world have been explained as the result of reversals of intergenerational flows of wealth. According to this theory, the child was transformed from an economically-useful household asset to an emotionally-valued parental burden. This article is based on a comparative study of changing understandings of parenthood in three provincial English localities between 1850 and 1914. It works from the premise that in order to make sense of reproductive behaviour, it is essential to examine the meanings that men and women attached to childlessness, child-rearing and parenthood.

It is argued that there was not a universal shift that made children into burdens. New understandings of the duties of parenthood did develop, but these were founded on class-, gender- and place-specific interpretations. These encouraged a minority of fathers and mothers to believe that together they had the capacity to improve the lives of their sons and daughters in pioneering ways. Given that husbands and wives had distinct motives for avoiding rearing many children and that the discussion of reproduction was shrouded in silence, the dissemination and use of new ideals of family was crucial in enabling birth control to be thought about respectably within marriage.     

Economic status,religion, and demography in an Ulster town in the early twentieth century

The paper offers an analysis of the demography of the confessionally-divided and heavily industrialized northern Irish town of Lurgan in the early twentieth century. Its main source is the individual household forms of the Irish population census of 1911. This was the first Irish census to provide household-level data on the number of children born—and the number still surviving—to married couples co-resident at the time of the census. The paper begins by producing standard cross-tabulations of socio-economic status, as represented by literacy, numeracy, occupation, and the labour force participation of married women, by religion. It then presents econometric analyses of female labour force participation, marital fertility, and infant and child mortality. The greater poverty of Catholic households forced a higher proportion of mothers to work outside the home, mainly as unskilled workers in the town's linen mills. The analysis of the marital fertility suggests that confessional affiliation did not influence family size much at this juncture. The analysis of infant and child mortality suggests that religious affiliation was to a significant extent a cloak for living standards and socio-economic advantage.     

An Exploratory Analysis of Fertility Differentials in India

The association between improving economic conditions and declining growth of population has led economists and demographers to hypothesise a direct relationship between indicators of economic development and fertility rates. Using recent National Family Health Survey data and the 1991 Census to explore factors contributing to fertility rates in India, we found that economic variables explain 70 per cent of the interstate variations in India's fertility rates. However, several non-economic variables explain an even greater proportion, for example, indicators of female autonomy explain 84 per cent of the variations. Our analysis demonstrates that to successfully explain Indian fertility rates, models must rely heavily on non-economic variables.     

Population Generations and Economic Growth: An Analysis on Population Policy Choices under the New Normal

When the generation of post-80s entered the labor market during 2003—2013, the China economic growth presented an inverted U type track. When the generations of post-90s and post-00s enter the labor market, growth will have dramatically declined. With post-90s and post-00s entering into the labor market, population bonus begins to disappear after 2016. To prevent Chinese economic fastly falling into demographic cliff, the paper evaluate the delay retirement and fertility policy, and we found that, when post- 90s and post-00s are entering into the labor market, delaying retirement is better than not, maintaining fertility policy unchanged is better than a relaxed fertility policy, while adjusting the retirement system brings about great effect. Delayed retirement policies need to be performed immediately, fertility policy is important, but not urgent.