Common use of Fertility Clause in Contracts

Fertility. Generally speaking, the crude birth rate (number of live births per 1000 people) has decreased in all three countries since the 1970s. The rate of decrease has been much more gradual in Argentina and Uruguay than in Chile. Yet as the chart below shows, Chile’s rate dropped to below that of Argentina in the early 1990s and below Uruguay’s in the mid 1990s; it then rose to very slightly above Uruguay’s rate after the turn of the millennium. Interestingly, though, Chile’s crude birth rate spiked in the early years of the dictatorship. As I have suggested previously, sexual health programmes were severely cut during the dictatorship, particularly in the beginning: ▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇ notes that ‘conservatives made some efforts to shut down family planning during the Pinochet dictatorship, but these were ultimately unsuccessful’53. With these programmes pared down, women had less access both to contraceptives and to information about sexual health, explaining the sharp rise in births during these years. In fact, in 1978 there were even campaigns to ‘dignificar y estimular la maternidad’ after the dictatorship became alarmed by the 53 Sex and the State: Abortion, Divorce, and the Family under Latin American Dictatorships and Democracies (Cambridge: UP, 2003), p. 167. rapid decrease in birth rate54. However, once the contraceptive programmes were fully reinstated, the birth rate once again decreased. However, it is important to remember that while women have more control than ever before as to the number of children that they have, women from poorer backgrounds are still more likely to be the ones with more children, especially since elective abortion is illegal in Chile and Argentina (and has only recently been legalised in Uruguay): poorer women are less likely to be able to have access to birth control and private clinics55. ▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ reports that middle class and upper class women in Uruguay state that they would like to have or to have had one child more than they actually do, whereas women on lower incomes usually report wanting fewer children56. Fascinatingly, ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇ finds that the fertility rate amongst women with university education in Chile had not dropped between 1960 and 2002, remaining at 1.9 children on average: it is amongst women with only a primary education that the real change has happened, with the rate falling from an average of 4 children to 2.857.