Kriss-Elin Meidell Haldorsen

Though there is a technologically conservative prohibition against birth control among Catholic populations, does this prohibition really exist in behavior?

Though there is a technologically conservative prohibition against birth control among Catholic populations, it does not seem to exist in behavior in all countries. Based on the countries I have chosen there seem to be a high percentage contraceptive prevalence rate, and there seem not to be any correlation between birth rate and the use of birth control.

Does Catholic prohibition really have an influence on birth control use (reflected in a high birth rate) or do other factors appear to play a greater role in birth rate (poverty, education, infant mortality rate, short average life span, etc.)?

 

Catholic prohibition does not have an significant influence on a these nations use of birth control, but there exist other factors that correlate more closely with high birth rates. These are factors like fertility, GDP - per capita, education and infant mortality.

There seem to be a trend that countries with high birth rate have low education which place them at a low poverty level, also in these countries the women have the lowest mean age at their first birth. Because of the short amount of school years they tend to start a family at a young age.

High infant mortality have a close correlation to high birth rates. Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, Jamaica and Indonesia are the nations with the highest birth rates and the highest infant mortality rate. These five nations are also the poorest and the one with the lowest education level. Of these five countries only three of them have a high percentage of Catholic citizens.

From the statistics we can view that the nations with highest total fertility have the lowest education level and the highest percentage of infant mortality. These countries are also among the poorest countries. This can indicate that there are an unstable environment in the countries and that they do not have the wealth to build up a decent health system.

Based on these nine countries I found no significant correlation between the Catholic religion and the high birth rate. There seem to be other factors that tend to affect the birth rate instead.

Tonje Sveinunggard

Birth rate and ideology
Tonje Sveinunggard

I have chosen to look at the different variables when it comes to average income, urbanization and school life expectancy in nine different nations. In six of these nine counties are 80 % or more of the population Catholics (marked as blue), the last three are countries that have less than 5 % Catholic citizens (marked as red) and they are all listed below.

Nation	Catholic (%)	Birth rate /1000	Average income	School life expectancy	Urbanization
Ireland	87,4 %	15,5	$42.600	19 years	62.0 %
Italy	80,0 %	8,9	$30.600	16 years	68.0 %
France	83,0 %	12,6	$36.100	16 years	85.0 %
Colombia	90,0 %	17,0	$11.000	14 years	75.0 %
Spain	94,0 %	10,4	$31.000	17 years	77.0 %
Mexico	82,7 %	18,6	$15.600	14 years	78.0 %
Burma	1,0 %	18,9	$1.400	9 years	32.6 %
Somalia	0,0 %	41,45	$600	3 years	37.7 %
Indonesia	3,0 %	17,38	$5.100	13 years	50.7 %

First of all I look at the relationship between percentage of Catholic’s within the nation and their correlation with birth rate. As you can see in the table above, there are at least two evidences suggesting that there is no correlation between the two variables. If you look at Indonesia and Colombia, you will see that they have almost the same numbers of birth rate, but the percentage of Catholic citizens is totally different (90 % and 3 %). Secondly there are also great variations between all of the “blue” countries when it comes to birth rate, even all of the nations are “Catholic nations” with a percentage over 80.

Second I would like to take a look at school life expectancy and how it affects the birth rate – and if it does. There is a trend showing that the longer you go to school, the lower is your birth rate. The only exception here is Ireland. The countries with 9 years and more of education are much lower than Columbia with only 3 years of education, but more than a doubling in birth rate.

Third I want to look at average income and birth rate. As you can see above the lower your income is, the higher is the birth rate. There can be many reasons for this, but I believe that lack of contraception can be one of them. Less wealthy people do also need to have many kids so they can work to earn enough money for survival. The nation with the lowest income is Somalia and here they have twice as high birth rate than the rest.

The last variable I would like to take a look at is the relationship between urbanization and birth rate. In general people tend to think that there is a correlation between many babies and living in small cities. If you take a look at the table, there is actually no clear trend confirming this claim. France, with the highest percentage of urbanization, is not especially low in birth rate. Neither is Mexico with its 78 % of urbanization and a birth rate of 18.6. This is almost as high as Burma with 18.9 and only an urbanization percent of 32. In other words, I cannot see these two variables affecting one another.

Conclusion:  In this research I found that there is no significant relationship between the religion and the birth rate in a nation. There are on the other hand many other variables than the religion that affects the birth rate. Average income stands out as the most important factor in this study.
So even if there is a technologically conservative prohibition against birth control among Catholic nations, there is no clear trend or proof of this. As shown above there are very Catholic countries with lower birth rates, and non-Catholic countries with high(est) birth rate.

Reference: www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html

Elise Horn

ELISE HORN - ASSIGNMENT #3
Six nations with a high percentage of Catholic citizens (65% or more)

 Three nations that do not have a notable Catholic population (less than 5%)

Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/

Conclusion

I have collected data from six nations with a high degree of Catholic citizens, Portugal, Brazil, Italy, Poland, Philippines and Mexico and three nations with a low degree Norway, Iceland and Egypt. You might think that nations with a high percentage of Catholics would have high birth rates, because of the Catholic Church`s prohibition against artificial contraception. But this is not the observable reality. Based on the data collected from these countries there are no significant correlation between the existing behavior of people and the technologically conservative prohibition against birth control in Catholic populations. An overall trend is that Catholic nations have a high or moderate use of contraceptive, the only exception is Philippines with a contraceptive prevalence rate at 48.9%. 

Catholic prohibition of birth control doesn’t have a significant influence on a nations birth rate. However, based on the data collected there are other factors that appear to correlate more closely with high birth rate. These factors are poverty level, infant mortality rate, contraceptive prevalence rate and average education level. In the data collected there are a strong correlation between birth rate and infant mortality rate. The four nations with highest birth rate, Philippines, Egypt, Mexico and Brazil all have the highest infant mortality rate as well. There seems to be a trend that nations where infants have a high probability to die there are born more children. Philippines, Egypt, Brazil and Mexico are the nations with the lowest degree of education. There exist a correlation between poverty and high births rates. High level of education shows a correlation to high birth rate. In nations where people spend few years in school, there exist a trend of higher birth rates. The two nations with the highest birth rate are the two nations with the lowest contraceptive prevalence rate, Egypt 60.3% and Philippines 48.9%. These nations are also the poorest nations and the nations with the lowest education level in this data collection. There seems to be a correlation between a nations low income, low education level, low contraceptive prevalence rate and high birth rate. Low education and low income influences the use of birth control and leads to higher birth rate.

The result of the data collected is consistent with the r/K selection theory. The rich nations are a typical example of K selection. They have a stable environment, use longer time to reproduce, have a low infant mortality rate and few offspring. On the other side you have r selection. Consisting of the poor nations. They have a less stable environment, high infant mortality rate, use shorter time to reproduce and have more offspring.