Violence and precarity: A neglected cause of large family sizes in Pakistan

ABSTRACT

A key objective of Pakistan’s family planning program has been to increase awareness of the benefits of a small family. Despite five decades of effort, family size ideals of four children persist. Research suggests a preference for large families and many sons is driven by an economic and gender order that situates sons, and subsequent large families, as a form of financial and social capital. We argue an additional factor promoting large family size in Pakistan is precarity. Drawing upon 13 months’ of ethnographic work from a village in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, our data show our respondents’ preference for large families with several sons was a rational response to precarity, created by economic insecurity and persistent conflict. While child mortality has reduced, the risk of an untimely conflict-related death of adult sons remains high and continues to play a crucial role in our respondents’ family size calculations. Our research contributes to the body of literature listing the forces pushing large family sizes and provides an additional explanation for Pakistan’s stagnating modern contraceptive prevalence rate. It also provides policy direction for reducing Pakistan’s high fertility rate, suggesting a need to address the upstream factors that contribute to the continuing need for large families.

KEYWORDS:

• Contraceptives
• conflict
• family planning
• son preference
• Pakistan

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the women and men in our field sites for their generosity of time and for welcoming AA into their homes. We would like to thank our research assistants for their support of the data collection. In addition, the authors would like to thank Dr. Emma Varley and Dr. Stephen Kent for reviewing and providing comments on early drafts of this article. The study was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research awarded to Prof. Zubia Mumtaz (Grant No 21376-CIHR). Funding from the International Development Research Centre, Canada, enabled Dr. Anushka Ataullahjan to revisit her field-site, share emerging findings and collect additional data (Award No. 107473-99906075-059).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Due to the nature of this research, participants of this study did not agree for their data to be shared publicly, so supporting data is not available.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Canadian Institutes of Health Research [grant number 21376-CIHR] and International Development Research Centre, Canada [grant number 107473-99906075-059].