THE IMPACT OF WOMENS EDUCATION ON FERTILITY IN LATIN-AMERICA - SEARCHING FOR EXPLANATIONS

According to data from Demographic and Health Surveys for nine Latin American countries, women with no education have large families of 6-7 children, whereas better educated women have family sizes of 2-3 children, analogous to those of women in the developed world. Despite these wide differentials in actual fertility desired family size is surprisingly homogeneous through-out the educational spectrum. While the least educated and the best educated women share the small family norm, the gap in contraceptive prevalence between the two groups ranges from 20-50 percentage points. Better educated women have broader knowledge, higher socioeconomic status and less fatalistic attitudes toward reproduction than do less educated women: Results of a regression analysis indicate that these cognitive, economic and attitudinal assets mediate the influence of schooling on reproductive behavior and partly explain the wide fertility gap between educational strata.