The future of fertility in Latin America: what can a comparison with southern Europe contribute to understanding contemporary Latin American fertility change?

Fiona L. Willis-Núñez, University of California, Berkeley and United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE)

Latin America tends to fall into a gap between two branches of literature on fertility: the ‘developing country’ branch focusing on declines from high to moderate fertility; and the ‘industrialised country’ (primarily European) branch focusing on the drivers of sub-replacement and ‘lowest-low’ fertility. While levels and rates of change differ widely across Latin America, all the region’s countries have experienced declines in fertility, bringing many of them into or close to the realm of low fertility. Rather than declaring these countries’ demographic transitions to be over, this paper proposes that we must ask what trajectory fertility change will take next, and what its principal driving forces will be. The paper investigates the hypothesis that the future of fertility in some parts of Latin America will resemble the current ‘lowest-low’ fertility scenarios of Southern Europe. In particular, the paper focuses on the concept of ‘familism’—drawing on the argument that a strong culturally-embedded sense of obligation to family, with sharply gender-delineated roles in family duties, when placed in a newly-emerging setting of increased gender equity in the public sphere (education, labour force participation), leads to postponement of and/or withdrawal from childbearing. This argument is commonly applied to the Mediterranean case, but here its applicability to Latin America is explored. Data from the Latinobarómetro, Eurobarometer and World Values Surveys are analysed to investigate how values and attitudes indicative of ‘familism’ are related to fertility outcomes (both timing and quantum) at the individual level. Relationships between societal variables linked to familism and national fertility levels are also examined. These analyses suggest that the ‘paradox’ of strong family values and a retreat from family-building may well come to characterise some countries, such as Chile, Argentina and Costa Rica, and that their fertility may indeed fall to very low levels in the future.