Reproductive behavior and contraceptive practices in comparative perspective, Switzerland (1955–1970)

‘Two children to make ends meet’: the ideal family size, parental responsibilities and costs of children on two sides of the Iron Curtain during the post-war fertility decline

“…There has been a long-standing assumption that women, because they carry the burden of pregnancy, have been the driving force behind fertility limitation practises (Gittins, 1982). Recent oral history studies on Western and Eastern Europe, however, have challenged and complicated this narrative by showing how responsibility for birth control could be gendered depending on the cultural, social and institutional context (Claro, 2016;Fisher, 2006;Hilevych, 2015;Rusterholz, 2015b;Szreter & Fisher, 2010). Moreover, it has been argued that a shift in contraceptive methods took place in the second half of the twentieth century; traditional methods, such as withdrawal, which was deemed to be mainly a man's responsibility, are said to have been replaced by modern and primarily women-controlled methods of birth control (Cook, 2004), such as the contraceptive pill in post-war Western Europe and abortion in Eastern Europe.…”

“…However, when looking at this issue from the perspective of responsibilities, the private realities of women, at least, look more similar than different. In Switzerland, women accepted that they carried the responsibility for both traditional and modern methods, and gynaecologists often played a crucial role in informing women of these possibilities (Rusterholz, 2015b). 18 In Ukraine, while men continued to be perceived as responsible for birth control, it was often women who were responsible for the final decision on whether to keep the pregnancy or terminate it through abortion (Hilevych, 2015).…”

Producing bodies at risk in sexual health – an ethnographic comparative analysis between the combined oral contraceptive pill and pre-exposure prophylaxis in Switzerland

“…In the Western world, women got access to the COCP in the 1960s (Mottier, 2008, p. 54), and this event was part of what Caroline Rusterholz (2015) describes as a 'contraceptive revolution' (p. 41).…”

The Mid-Twentieth Century Baby Boom and the Role of Social Influence. An Agent-Based Modelling Approach

“…Around 1950, more people married at a younger age than at any point in the past two centuries, making it truly "the golden age of marriage" (Coontz, 2005). At the same time, the contraceptive pill had yet to make an appearance and even though there were advances in the use of other contraceptive methods (Rusterholz, 2015), marriage and fertility were still very closely connected during this period (Coale, 1977). Thus, not only did people have children at an earlier age due to the declining age at first marriage, more people marrying meant that more people had children.…”

“…Yet, it seems that by the end of the 1930s, parenthood and family life experienced a renaissance while alternative life trajectories were dismissed (Hülsken, 2010;Koropeckyj-Cox, Pienta, & Brown, 2007). Limiting family size on the other hand was hardly new, but developments in contraceptives (Barrusse, 2014;Rusterholz, 2015) and increasing costs of childrearing (Duvoisin, 2017;Hilevych & Rusterholz, 2018;Rusterholz, 2017) might have resulted in a strengthening of the norm to not have more than two children. In any case, more and more people were having two children and understanding the rise of the two-child family might therefore contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms that have brought about the Baby Boom itself.…”