Family allowance and family planning in Chile.

Abstract

Family allowances designed to promote maternal and child health and welfare could be selfdefeating if they stimulated otherwise unwanted births, as often assumed. That assumption, with its public health and demographic implications, needs testing. An attempt to test it was made in Chile in 1969-1970 through interviews with 945 wives receiving an allowance and 690 non-recipients. Recipients practiced contraception significantly more than did non-recipients. This was not explained by wives' educational attainment or employment, the couples' earnings, or number of living children, but was associated with a 50 per cent greater utilization of professional prenatal care by recipients during the most recent pregnancy;Family allowance systems providing an additional stipend for each child might discourage family planning, as a Planned Parenthood Federation editorial cautioned,' but thishas not yet been demonstrated. "An extensive literature about whether pronatalist government policies, such as family allowances, can increase fertility is inconclusive," wrote Freedman,2 probably expressing the consensus among scholars. Heer and Bryden found "it is not possible to offer conclusive proof concerning the effects of any family allowance program,"3 and Moynihan declared "whatever else changes the birth rate, the family allowance does not."4 Although most of the studies have focused on the economically advanced countries, Whitney was persuaded that "whether ... less developed countries have any form of family or children's allowances appears wholly unrelated to the level of fertility."5 Concurring that the postulated relationship had not been documented, Simon concluded "the only source of a response estimate must be studies of actual programmes. women with such care (regardless of allowance status) were 75 per cent more likely than others to control their fertility. Prenatal care was probably sought more by recipients in part because an additional stipend was provided as soon as pregnancy was confirmed, usually at clinics with integrated family planning. Greater family income, attributable to the allowance, probably also contributed to the recipients' better prenatal attention and to contraceptive practice. Noteworthy, too, was the finding that with the number of living children controlled, contraceptive practice was significantly greater among couples who had never lost a child. (Am. J. Public Health 68: 989-994, 1978.) credited by one author with having "stimulated population growth" and the later modifications with having "started a population explosion".8 The United Nations' demographic data do not confirm this, however, but show instead that in each instance the legislative change was followed by a drop in the birth rate the next year.9 Instead of the predicted "explosion", births fell from 36.1 per thousand in 1961 to 32.8 in 1964 and then to 25.0 by 1969. While the decline might possibly have been even more rapid without the presumed pronatalist incentive, any effect of the successive extensions of eligibi...

Are demographic developments influenced by social security?

“…Bradbury (1978) concludes that an increase in benefits has only promoted fertility in a limited number of cases. And in Chile, where in the framework of a family support program an extra amount was paid for every dependent person, Plank (1978) found that the relation between receipt of public assistance benefit and fertility was negative rather than positive.…”