The Extent of Contraceptive Use and the Social Paradigm of Modern Demography

Abstract

For many years demographers have cited their estimates of contraceptive use as an incontrovertible refutation of biological or biosocial theories of the Western fertility declines. Besides ignoring the many biological reasons for family limitation, however, this argument ignores the several procedures demographers have built into their contraceptive surveys to increase the proportion of respondents who can be classed as users. The biases engendered by these procedures may well be regarded as ad hoc and surreptitious strategems designed to reconcile the social `paradigm' with the near replacement fertility of most Western countries in the 1930s.