Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Demography 361
societies reduce fertility, and it may be said that at this stage of evolution,
couples have the children that biology and society together permit them to
have - but they have all of those. The individual has little say in the matter;
he can only submit to the laws of nature and of society.
26. The practice of contraception has, in the first place, a quantitative effect,
making possible the avoidance of a considerable number of births. But it also
has a qualitative effect. Let us imagine a perfectly effective contraceptive. Then
all the children who would be born would be children wanted by their parents.
Their arrival in this world would no longer depend on a decision of society. This
decision would be taken in the private consciences of the parents. The birth of a
child instead of being a socio-biological event, would become a psycho-sociological
one.l0This change in its nature would have important results for research;
it would no longer be sufficient to know how births happen, we should want to
know also why they happen. No doubt we shall still have to wait some time for a
completely effective contraceptive. Still, recent progress in this domain has
brought us sufficiently close to such an eventuality for it to have induced research
to turn its attention to the question of ‘why’ births happen.
27. Additional problems arise from the fact that psychological knowledge is in
advance of biological knowledge. These undesired children that are born willy-
nilly, because we do not yet know how to exercise full control over biological
phenomena, are at the origin of family tensions which ought to be studied.”
The mere possibility of contraception can even be an occasion for discord
between a married couple.
Further, the mechanisms which society has devised to limit the size of fami-
lies have not disappeared for all that. Their continued existence can also be a
source of difficulty. This provides a good example of the tensions resulting from
variations in the evolutionary speed of the three sets of factors brought into
play by demographic events - biological, sociological and psychological.
28. The manner in which demographers approach the study of fertility needs
changing in order to take into account the above-mentioned factors. The tradi-
tional method at present when studying fertility is to distinguish between mar-
ried couples and others, and to pay particular attention to legitimate fertility.
But, behind this distinction lies a variable which we have referred to above
- the frequency of sexual intercourse, and it is because we know little about
it that we choose, for want of anything better, to deal separately with married
couples. In so doing, we divide the population up grosso nzodo into two
categories with differing frequency rates for sexual intercourse, a lesser rate in
the case of the non-married than in that of others.IZ But the day we know more
about the sociology of sexuality, parameters that are at present ignored wil be
seen to be fundamental. Whereas today we use the marriageable age or the age
of puberty as parameters, later on we shall take into consideration the age at
which sexual intercourse begins, and we shall draw distinctions between various
types of couples based on the frequency of such intercourse. We shall also take