EXPLAINING FERTILITY TRANSITIONS

In this essay, I suggest that the crisis in our understanding of ferti lity transitions is more apparent than real. Although most existing th eories of fertility transition have been partially or wholly discredit ed, this reflects a tendency to assume that all fertility transitions share one or two causes, to ignore mortality decline as a precondition for fertility decline, to assume that pretransitional fertility is wh olly governed by social constraints rather than by individual decision -making, and to test ideas on a decadal time scale. I end the essay by suggesting a perceptual, interactive approach to explaining fertility transitions that is closely allied to existing theories but focuses o n conditions that lead couples to switch from postnatal to prenatal co ntrols on family size.