Fertility and Contraception during the Demographic Transition: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches

Abstract

Demographic, cultural, and oral-history approaches to the study of falling fertility in nineteenth-and twentieth-century France, Canada, Britain, Holland, Norway, and Finland confirm the importance of the persistent usage of “traditional” methods of birth control—such as coitus interruptus, abortion, and forms of periodic abstinence—throughout the period when fertility fell, though fertility fell in each case at a different point in time. These studies also use qualitative evidence that provides insight into the reasons for contraceptive preference, thereby combining the history of changing sexualities with the analysis of demographic change.