Thursday, November 6, 2008

Sachs addressing fertility rates

Of course coming off of last semester's extensive look into fertility rates and population growth, I feel as if we have an unfair advantage in poking holes in Sachs in comparison to his average reader (of course by the same note I guess we could say that about most of the authors we read :). I find Sachs discussion of fertility very familiar from the pro-government policy people we read. However, as a result the same arguments remain. Referring back to Lant Pritchett's paper entitled, Desired Fertility and the Impact of Population Policies, I would like to introduce the most compelling argument in my mind against government fertility policy focused heavily, primarily, or exclusively on the "fertilization" stage of fertility rate. Sachs and other like minded scholars repeatedly bring up accounts of service recipients saying how were it not for the provision of contraceptives they would have an over abundance of children just like their parents (Sachs 181). In response Pritchett provides significant data based evidence showing that mothers consistently bear children at numbers equal to or close to the number of children they desire to have. The failure of government policy programs focusing on contraceptive distribution supports this conclusion well.
All is not lost for Sachs though. He briefly mentions the shift in focus in 1994 at the International Conference on Population and Development to more actively promote, and push to the forefront, policies providing an array of sexual and reproductive health services (safe pregnancy, delivery, control of spread of STDs). This push makes perfect sense in the grander scheme of what we actually know to affect fertility rates (by way of affecting desired fertility): decreasing infant mortality. Such health oriented services would surely decrease infant mortality rates thereby causing mothers to have a decreased need for larger broods in the hopes that some make it to adulthood. A look at demographic shifts over the past several centuries supports this logic as Sachs presents such evidence himself. His only failure in this is linking these two explicitly, instead of saying, "oh look so they decided to change their focus and now it's being used in the Millennium Promises, great they are working to do change." I would have liked a further elaboration of the connection between fertility rates and the current and good policies being implemented and how they differ from older ideas.

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