Australian Aboriginal fertility in decline

Abstract

Studies published during the 1960s and early 1970s noted that the Aboriginal population of Australia had both high fertility and high mortality relative to the rest of the Australian population, and envisaged rapid growth of the small Aboriginal component of the total population. It was not until the late 1970s that signs appeared that Aboriginal fertility must have fallen dramatically during the earlier part of the decade. Because of deficiencies in quantitative description of the Aboriginal population, the nature and extent of the apparent fertility decline was unknown. Using data from population censuses and other sources, this study firstly establishes the extent of fertility decline and coincidental changes in mortality, noting geographical variations where they exist. The total fertility rate of the Aboriginal population has fallen by over forty per cent in a decade, after earlier slow increase to a plateau of high fertility during the 1960s. The decline has taken place in all geographical areas but has not been uniform across age groups: in fact, there has been little change in the high age specific birth rates of young Aboriginal women. Coinciding with fertility decline, there has been a marked reduction of Aboriginal infant mortality, but adult mortality remains extremely high not only relative to the rest of the Australian population, but in absolute terms. It seems unlikely that the Aboriginal population will in the future grow at a more rapid rate than the rest of the Australian population. The mechanism of fertility decline was the provision of contraceptive advice to Aboriginal women through rapidly-expanding health services in Aboriginal communities from the end of the 1960s. Health professional hoped that assisting Aboriginal women to limit their families would be a meaningful contribution towards reducing socio-economic privation. The expansion of health services was also associated with the reduction in infant and childhood mortality rates, so that both fertility and mortality decline shared a common mechanism. The attitudes and motivations of Aboriginal women to fertility and family planning have been examined through attitudinal surveys in five Aboriginal communities. Aboriginal people may sometimes talk casually about the need to ’keep blacking on’, but Aboriginal women generally approve the use of contraception, particularly for spacing births. However, extreme reticence on the part of Aboriginal people about the reproductive aspects of women’s lives poses serious problems for the delivery of health services. There is disparity between what Aboriginal women want, what health services would like to achieve, and what is actually achieved. The reasons that Aboriginal women give for wanting more children, or not, reveal the importance of economic considerations at the household level in fertility motivations. These microeconomic motivations are linked with changes brought on by the improvement of educational opportunites for Aboriginal children. The effects of change in educational opportunities, however, are most apparent in the parental generation rather than among the recipients of longer education, for whom Aboriginal methods of family formation provide a strong prop for continuing high fertility in early adulthood.

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