It is often observed that educated women have lower birth rates than do the less educated, inviting a causal interpretation. However, educated women also differ from those who have never attended school in a variety of other ways: the two factors are multiply related. This article analyzes the...

Educated women in southern Cameroon both condemn abortion and practice it with some regularity. This apparent paradox arises because educated Cameroonian women use abortion as one of a set of strategies to manage the timing and social context of entry into motherhood. This paper is based on a...

Many studies of fertility implicitly equate temporal management, biomedical contraception, and "modernity" on the one hand, and "tradition," the lack of intentional timing, and uncontrolled fertility on the other. This article questions that equation, focusing on the widespread use of periodic...

This paper argues that demographic anthropology has, for most part, imported rather than exported theory. Yet, the discipline has the potential to generate important rethinking of population, culture, and their interaction. After discussing the state of the field and the challenges that must be...

We examine the stability of preferences over time using panel data from Kenya on fertility intentions, realizations, and recall of intentions. We find that desired fertility is very unstable, but that most people perceive their desires to be stable. Under hypothetical scenarios, few expect their...