Reply to Sloan [on proxies for birth control]

Sloan (1984) argues that annual changes in marital fertility of Swedish wives aged 35-39 between 1911 and 1974 is not a result of annual changes in the use of birth control but is due to changes in health conditions that increase or decrease marital fertility. As evidence of the lack of effect of contraceptive practice on fertility Sloan cites a study published in 1916 whose author concluded that contraceptive use or nonuse had no effect on family size. Sloan is unaware of the shroud of ignorance that blinded such research in the distant past. There was no accepted methodology to determine contraceptive effectiveness until the 1930s and scientists did not know key elemental facts about human reproduction. For example the relationship of ovulation to the risk of pregnancy was unknown in 1916 and was to remain a mystery for more than a decade thereafter. Sloans "declining health" explanation of low fertility in the West is merely a variant of an older attempt to explain low fertility as a result of high protein intake. Sloans view that modern couples do not contracept to reach a desired family size and that changes in family size preference will not affect birth control practice among older (or younger it appears as well) couples seems to us to be an idiosyncratic view at best and directly opposed by all survey research. Couples do contracept most effectively when they are trying to prevent an additional birth. The view that failure of some Western couples to reproductively compensate for their child deaths as explained by poor reproductive health seems to assume that couples in non-Western population do so compensate but this is wrong. The idea that such bereaved couples should have another child is so insensitive to tragedy as to defy further reply. Sloans acceptance and use of reports that some couples say they wanted more children than they had ignores massive research findings of unwanted fertility among couples in populations with long histories of birth control practice. Further it is difficult to have much faith in such responses since about 1/2 the couples in the Whelpton el al. study cited by Sloan also said they were fecund. These responses mean that couples may say that they want more than they actually had but they deliberately did not have such a large and "ideal" family size because of other factors not considered by Sloan. Since it appears that Sloan was unable to find another authority he cites a 3 page comment of his own in support of the hypothesis of deteriorating environment. He does not actually empirically link age patterns of chronic disease with fecundity loss; his view also ignores research indicating improved health conditions at least among US women after the mid-1930s that increased fecundity and then fertility. Thus his argument that factors other than voluntary birth control could explain annual change in Swedish marital fertility among older couples is unsupported by empirical evidence. His remarks are also irrelevant to the use made in the authors article concerning marital fertility rates as a proxy for the use of annual birth control change among younger unmarried women. The marital rate varies as does the illegitimacy rate. Annual increases in marital fertility are related to annual increases in illegitimacy; annual declines in marital rates to annual declines in illegitimacy. Sloans hypothetical trends in fecundity have no bearing on our empirical study of annual change in Swedish illegitimacy rates. Finally Sloans claim that social demographers do not view a changing environment as problematic is unsupported and unjustified. (authors modified)