Education and Family Planning among Black American Women

Abstract

The factors which relate to family planning and fertility-related attitudes and practices among black Americans are not well understood. This study evaluates the importance of three demographic factors (level of education, age, and region) in predicting such fertility related variables. Black women between the ages of fifteen and forty-five ( N = 1,074) living in either a northern or a southern city were interviewed. The fertility-related variables included knowledge of, attitudes toward, and usage of various family planning methods; desired, ideal, and actual family size; and fears of race genocide. Using a three-factor (education, age, and region) Analysis of Variance for each of the dependent variables, education emerged as the most powerful and the only consistent predictor of the several fertility-related variables. Only desired number of children was unrelated to level of education. Such findings provide support for the contention that black fertility levels would be the same as that among whites, if access to equal educational opportunity were available to Blacks.