CONTENTS
HIGHLIGHTS
November, 1996 |
Rural-to-urban migrant women generally have more children than urban nonmigrant women but fewer than rural nonmigrants (303). For example, a study of DHS data for eight Latin American countries found that native urban women had an average of three children, rural-to-urban migrants averaged four, and rural nonmigrants averaged six (211). DHS data also show that, among urban women ages 30 to 34, the average number of children ever born is higher for rural-to-urban migrants than for urban nonmigrants in 19 of 22 countries, with differences of more than one child per woman in Morocco, Peru and Senegal (see Figure 2). Such statistics include births that occurred both before and after migration (32, 274). Also, more rural-to-urban migrant women, on average, consider a larger family ideal than do native urban residents. This difference occurs in most of the 22 DHS surveys studied by Population Reports, but most differences are quite small. Fertility of refugees and internally displaced persons. Data on the fertility of refugees and internally displaced persons are few. The Women's Commission on Refugee Women and Children observes, however, that "women in refugee sites throughout the world—many of them in questionable health and with few or no material resources—are having large numbers of pregnancies at closely spaced intervals" (335). For example, among about 739,000 refugees from Rwanda in five camps in Goma, for January to September 1996, the crude birthrate was 41 per 1,000 population (298)—high by world standards and about the same rate as for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole. Refugee groups differ substantially in fertility. For example, among women in refugee camps in Thailand, birthrates were much lower among lowland Laotians than among the Hmong. The Hmong married younger than the lowland Laotians. Only 3% of Hmong women were using contraception compared with 42% of the lowland Lao. On average, Hmong women wanted 6.2 children compared with 3.4 children among the lowland Lao (69). Refugee fertility may be elevated when couples fear that children will not survive to adulthood, or they want to replace children who died or became separated from the family during the emergency (126, 327). Also, food and other benefits in camps may be based on family size, or refugee leaders may discourage use of contraception because they believe people should have large families (335). Many people in emergency situations may want to have fewer children, however, and thus are motivated to use contraception (117, 255, 335). |