“If You Don’t Have a Baby, You Can’t Be in Our Culture”: Migrant and Refugee Women’s Experiences and Constructions of Fertility and Fertility Control

Abstract

The present study was designed to explore experiences and constructions of fertility and fertility control among new migrant and refugee women in Sydney, Australia and Vancouver, Canada. Seventy-eight individual interviews and 15 focus groups (n = 82) were conducted with women who had migrated from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Sri Lanka, and South America. Participants positioned having children as a cultural and religious mandate and as central to a woman’s identity. Many women had limited knowledge about contraception, positioned contraception as forbidden or dangerous, and described negative experiences with its use. These findings are interpreted in relation to the provision of culturally safe medical practice and sexual and reproductive health education.

Keywords:

• Australia
• Canada
• contraception
• fertility
• migrant and refugee women
• qualitative methods

Note

Disclosure statement

No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.

Notes

1 The term culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) is used in Australia to describe people who have a cultural heritage different from the dominant Anglo Australian culture (Australian Government Department of Health, 2016); it replaced the previously used term of people from a “non-English-speaking background” (NESB). As this term is not used in Canada, where many of our participants reside, we define our sample as “migrant and refugee women.”

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant LP130100087, in conjunction with Family Planning New South Wales (FPNSW), the Community Migrant Resource Centre (CMRC) and Centre for the Study of Gender, Social Inequities and Mental Health, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.