Researchers working in Haiti have long noted that rural parents were extremely pronatal. Both men and women hoped to have large families with many children.
Social scientists typically explained the trend with “love” and “prestige,” “absence of contraceptives,” and “tradition” (Herskovits 1937: 89); “the desire to live with reason, and to die with dignity” (Lowenthal 1987: 305); “fear of abandonment in women” (Maynard-Tucker 1996: 1387); rooted in the culture” (Ibid); old age security (Murray 1977); and even land redistribution mechanisms (Ibid). But no matter how they explained it, the one incontestable point was that peasants wanted many offspring. Children were considered desirable and a blessing.
However, there have long been factors that mitigate against high birth rates among the peasants. Specifically, high rates of infectious diseases, low-fat and low-calorie diets, high rates of female malnutrition, demanding work regimes, and a high rate of male absenteeism were all factors that weighed heavily against the likelihood of high birth rates.
Below I show that the unique social values associated with what I call Haiti’s “Pronatal Sociocultural Fertility Complex” reinforced by peculiar features of the rural Haitian “Sexual-Moral Economy” made high birth rates possible despite these afflictions.
To illustrate how, I look at data from Jean Rabel, a commune in Haiti where I conducted extensive research between 1990 and 2007, including a 1,586 household survey.
Jean Rabel vs. the Hutterites
If Jean Rabel were a country, then at the time I carried out my research it would have had the second highest total fertility rate (TFR) in the world: 7.1 births per mother. The achievement is startling because in the endeavor to reproduce, Jean Rabel women face extreme adversity. High incidence of diseases, widespread malnutrition, intensive physical exertion and labor regimes, and the disruption of unions through male absenteeism should impede high fertility. Yet, Jean Rabel fertility rates measure up impressively to that of the early 20th century Hutterites, people who had the highest sustained fertility levels ever recorded. Thirty-two percent of Jean Rabel women equal or exceed the median ten births attained by early to mid 20th century Hutterite women (Eaton and Mayer 1953; Larsen and Vaupel 1993; Nonaka et al. 1994) [note 1].
Figure 1: Completed fertility in Jean Rabel for women over 45 yrs
Factors that Dampen Fertility
Data from the 1,586 household Survey mentioned above indicate that 5.7 percent of Jean Rabel women never succeed in carrying a pregnancy to full term, a figure close to the median of 4.2 percent reported for all developing countries (Vaessen 1984). Clinic records for pregnant women also indicate that, at any given time, 5 to 10 percent of women in the region suffer from sexually transmitted diseases such as chlamydia, HIV/AIDS, and syphilis—maladies that interrupt and sometimes prematurely end reproductive careers. As seen, other widespread and debilitating diseases such as malaria, typhoid, and hepatitis annually leave over 30 percent of women in the region bedridden and sexually incapacitated for months and sometimes years [note 2].
Malnutrition and high levels of physical exertion are also factors known to lower fertility by inducing amenorrhea—the suspension of menstrual cycles for three or more months. In the Baseline Survey, women were found to generally consume low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets (see table 4.1). And 26 percent of Jean Rabel women were found to be slightly to severely malnourished [note 3].
Table 1: Most commonly eaten foods in Jean Rabel (N=1,483)
The average Jean Rabel woman also leads a physically demanding life. Fetching household water requires daily walks to water sources often located more than one half hour from the household. The return trip involves carrying a filled five-gallon bucket balanced on top of the head. Women also walk an average of six hours per week to make market purchases and sales for the household.
Figure 2: Completed fertility in Jean Rabel for five-year age groups
An average of six hours per week is also spent picking produce from the gardens, and another twelve to twenty-four hours are spent walking back and forth from the nearest water source to hand scrub clothes. This total exercise regime certainly matches or exceeds the five miles of jogging per week that induced amenorrhea in 6 percent of the U.S. subjects studied by Feight et al. (1978) and is probably closer to the weekly physical exertion of women in the same study who ran forty-five miles per week inducing amenorrhea in 43 percent of the cases. Extended breastfeeding, necessary in the absence of high-protein baby formulas, is also known to suppress ovulation (WHO 1999); and 63 percent of women in the Jean Rabel Baseline Survey reported breast feeding their last child for eighteen to twenty-seven months [note 4].
Figure 3: Duration of breastfeeding
Another factor researchers have identified as a determinant of low fertility is reduced exposure to the risk of pregnancy through late entry into union or disrupted union through factors such as wage migration (Bongaarts and Potter 1983; Williams et al. 1975; Blake 1954). Male absenteeism is part of the rural Haitian demographic profile. Males in Haiti migrate to larger Haitian cities and overseas to the Bahamas, the United States, and the Dominican Republic at a significantly higher rate than their female counterparts. The result is lower male-to-female sex ratios. In the Baseline Survey, 10 percent of Jean Rabel men in the twenty- to forty-nine-year-old age groups were reported as being absent and no longer considered as members of the household from which they originated. Furthermore, in the Opinion Survey, 26 percent of men in union reported having been away from home for at least 30 of the preceding 365 days (see table 3). Congruent with male transience, 52 percent of Jean Rabel women in the twenty- to twenty-four-year-old age group and 26 percent of women in the twenty-five to twenty-nine-year-old age group were not in union at the time of the interview,,, and at least 26 percent of women abandon or are abandoned by their first spouse during the course of their reproductive careers (see table 2).
In a society with strongly enforced values regarding monogamy and premarital pregnancy, the type of male absenteeism and transience being described would disrupt ongoing conjugal union and force a minority of women to remain out of union and childless. Yet, according to respondents in the Opinion Survey, the average age at first union for Jean Rabel women is 21.7 years and the average age at first childbirth is 22.3 years. These averages for Jean Rabel women are not unusually high or low. For example, the average age women in the remote rural Dominican Republic first enter into unions and give birth is significantly lower than the averages cited for Jean Rabel (McPherson and Schwartz 2001). Nevertheless, entry into union at moderate age and the high birth rates are accomplished despite high rates of male absenteeism.
Table 2: Mean age of follow-up survey respondents
Table 3: Temporary male migration in Jean Rabel
Table 4: Individuals still with first spouse
Jean Rabel Women vs. Hutterite Women
Despite all the preceding factors that work against high fertility, Jean Rabel women measure up impressively against the Hutterites of North Dakota and Canada, the healthy, well-fed, and fecund world champions of high fertility. Jean Rabel women on average eat two and sometimes only one cooked meal per day and meals rarely include meat or dairy foods (see table 1). Hutterite women eat three meals per day, every day, and meat, dairy products, or sometimes both are included in virtually every meal (Hostetler 1974: 353). Further, while Jean Rabel women are members of what is among the most disease-ridden populations in the Western hemisphere and at any given time upwards of 5 percent of Jean Rabel women are suffering from an STD—to say nothing of other infectious diseases—the incidence of infectious diseases among Hutterites is even lower than their healthy Canadian neighbors, something that Ross and Cheang (1997) attribute to a genetically superior immune system. When Eaton and Mayer (1953) surveyed the Hutterites during the 1940s they found virtually no deprivation or interruption of Hutterite unions resulting from imbalanced sex ratios, wage-migration, or divorce. There were 106 men for every 100 women in the twenty- to forty-nine-year-old age range. Only 33 percent of Hutterite women in the twenty- to twenty-four-year-old range were not in union; and only 7 percent of those in the twenty-five- to thirty-year-old age group were not in union. In comparison, 52 percent and 26 percent of Jean Rabel women in the same age groups were not in union (see table 5, following page). Eaton and Mayer (1953) noted that:
Hutterite couples are never separated after marriage. In the history of the group since 1875 there has been only one divorce and only 4 desertions. We know of one other case where husband and wife separated temporarily to live in different colonies. (p. 223)
Thus, while reproductive-age Jean Rabel women are faced with a 10 percent deficit of men, Hutterite women are outnumbered by men. And, as might be expected, there was an average of 13 percent more reproductive-age Hutterite women in union than there are in contemporary Jean Rabel [Note 5, 6].
But despite all of the limiting factors, including the absence of many Jean Rabel men and the physiological factors mitigating against high fertility, 32 percent of contemporary Jean Rabel women who have completed their childbearing careers equal or exceed the median ten children born per Hutterite woman in the years 1880 to 1950. Contemporary Jean Rabel fertility levels are 13 percent higher than contemporary Hutterites (Eaton and Mayer 1953; Larsen and Vaupel 1993; Nonaka et al. 1994) [Note 7].
Table 5: Hutterites vs. Jean Rabeliens: Percentage of women in union per five-year age group and sex ratios (includes widows)
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