ABSTRACT
In the second half of the twentieth century, the trajectory of fertility outside the ‘West’ has been shaped largely through an interaction of family systems and public population policies, constrained or facilitated by socio-economic structuration of literacy, urbanity and general (in)equality. The snag of modern history has been, that many of the traditional vital barriers to fertility – mortality, morbidity, malnutrition – and traditional restrictive norms have been eroded, before new norms of small families asserted themselves. In most parts of the Third World, the immediate response to post-World War II economic and medical developments was a rise of fertility, from enhanced fecundity and from the erosion of post-marital taboos.
