Fertility and contraception: The experience of Spanish women born in the first half of the twentieth century

Abstract

New data based on retrospective interviews with older informants enable us to review the history of contraceptive use among Spanish women over much of the twentieth century. This source is unique because it includes cohorts of women whose reproductive lives took place before, during, and after the baby boom. Traditional contraceptive methods (withdrawal and periodic abstinence) were central to the experience of the first set of women, while the last set made full use of modern as well as some traditional methods. For the first cohorts, traditional methods spearheaded the historic decline in fertility, while among the last set of women modern methods led to a precipitous decline towards the below-replacement fertility that continues in Spain today. There is no evidence that the modest increases in fertility during the baby boom in Spain were the result of a decline in the use of contraception among married women.

Keywords:

• contraceptive methods
• fertility
• baby boom
• low fertility
• fertility decline
• Spain

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Miguel Requena is based at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) and the Grupo de Estudios ‘Población y Sociedad’ (GEPS), both in Spain. David Reher and Alberto Sanz–Gimeno are both based at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), Spain, and at GEPS. Please direct all correspondence to Alberto Sanz–Gimeno, Facultad de CC. Políticas y Sociología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Campus de Somosaguas s/n, 28223—Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid), Spain; or by Email: [email protected]

2 Funding: This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (RTI2018–098455–B–C21) and by Programa de Actividades de I+D en Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Comunidad de Madrid (S2015/HUM–3321 and H2019/HUM–5802). The database used was created thanks to the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under grant number CSO2011–24625.

3 Data availability: Data used are available from GEPS, 2021, Spanish Survey on Baby Boom and Baby Bust 2012: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/XVEYVG, Harvard Dataverse, V1.