Revision of Fertility Preference After Achievement of Intended Birth: the Sri Lankan Experience

Abstract

Once effective methods of fertility limitation become widely available within a population, the impact of fertility intentions on subsequent fertility becomes a matter of both theoretical and practical importance. In many western countries, after the Second World War many demographers investigated the possibility of predicting fertility by supplementing information on past childbearing with information on fertility intentions and plans for future childbearing.

Among the different methods that have been used to make mid-range forecasts of fertility, surveys on fertility intentions seem at first sight to offer the advantage of being simple to estimate the number of children likely to be born, why not ask the people principally interested - women likely to have children - what their intentions are? Longitudinal studies conducted in a number of countries have demonstrated that the reproductive intentions of individual women were strongly predictive of whether or not they had had an additional birth, although this has consistently been observed mostly in societies where contraception is widely practiced.