Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

Agency amidst adversity: poverty and women’s reproductive lives 101
of adult children reciprocating in economic terms in the long run,
were very frequently raised during the group sessions and interviews
with individual women. It was also apparent that high rates of
unemployment in recent years have led to a situation where younger
people are becoming increasingly dependent on their parent’s
pensions for survival. The magnitude and direction of ‘wealth flows’
were predominantly from parents to children (or from older to
younger generations). In a community enduring economic insecurity
this scenario entrenches perceptions that children (both young and
old) are likely to be a drain on the stretched resources of the
individual and household.
At the same time, finding employment or a partnership which secured
greater financial security sometimes led to women talking about
children becoming more affordable. Having another child might
become a fairly immediate need of a woman who has been delaying
having additional children in the belief that she could not properly
support them. Thus, it is common to see women bear second children
about eight to ten years after their first child was born 33 . At a
superficial level, some credence for diffusionist interpretations (given
considerable use of contraception to regulate births) and new
household economics arguments suggesting economic choices on
appropriate number of children to bear seem evident. However, these
practices and decision-making processes are being shaped and driven
by a number of broader experiences of ‘crises’, complexities and
dilemmas as the vignettes in the following section reveal.
5. The social context of reproduction: dominant ‘patterns’ in
Winterveld
5.1 Responses to pregnancy, the possibility of pregnancy and
abandonment
Questions on teenage pregnancy often elicited negative responses
from both parents and teenagers alike. In Winterveld there was
frequent reference to the problem of unplanned, teenage
pregnancies as illustrated by the following comment from a group
session: 34
33 Garenne and Halifax suggest that one-third of total fertility in Southern Africa is
made up of premarital births. They also suggest that high levels of early
premarital births have created two peaks (modes) in age-specific fertility rate
(ASFR) values. One peak is centred on ages 18-20 years (predominantly premarital
fertility) and the other on 28-30 years (predominantly marital fertility). Reasons
for this lengthy spacing still require more intensive investigation. See M Garenne
& J Halifax ‘Pattern of premarital fertility in Southern Africa, and its correlates’
workshop paper, University of London, 1999.
34 Group session, ‘Ndlovu’s Group’, 15 October 1998.