Reproductive decision making: Asian women's ideas about family size, and the gender and spacing of children

Abstract

Women of Asian origins and descent constitute a large ethnic minority in the UK. However, although there is some evidence that Asian family size is larger than average for the UK, little is known about Asian women's attitudes to reproductive decisions. This paper reports some quantitative and qualitative data from a sample of Asian women living in East London.

One hundred Asian women with at least one child were interviewed about a number of aspects of their reproductive decision making, including preferred family size, gender composition of families, use of contraception, and methods of contraception. Their replies were compared with a group of 46 non-Asian women living in the same area. Like their non-Asian counterparts, most Asian women wanted two or three children, with Muslim women wanting somewhat larger families than Hindu, Sikh or non-Asian women. All women wanted a mix of boys and girls, although Asian women had stronger preferences than non-Asian women for more boys than girls. A majority of women had used contraceptives; Asian women were more likely to have used condoms and less likely than non-Asian women to have used the pill, but there were variations within the sample of Asian women. Women who were born in the UK or had lived in the UK for over ten years and women whose English was fluent were more likely to use contraception than women who had moved to the UK more recently and those whose English was less fluent.

To explore the processes involved in Asian women's reproductive decision making further, a subsample of the Asian women were interviewed in depth about their reasons for their choices and their ideas around the timing and spacing of births. Women reported a variety of factors influencing their decision making. These included concerns about the effects of contraception on future fertility, family pressures to have children, mothers' preferred ways of managing the work involved in caring for small children and how these related to children's needs.