Abstract:
In a widely cited article, Knodel and van de Walle attributed the European fertility transition to the emergence of "stopping" behavior (terminating childbearing before the end of the end of a woman's reproductive years) and suggested that this model was being repeated in other regions. The prevalence of "stopping" has become especially important for understanding fertility trends in Africa, where some observers see increasing use of modern contraception to increase the spacing between births. This paper uses a new approach based on the analysis of birth intervals to identify the extent of stopping and spacing in German villages, Taiwan, Cameroon, Ghana, and Mali. The German and Taiwanese data largely confirm Knodel and van de Walle's description, but stopping appears at very low family sizes more rapidly than they expected. There is no evidence that stopping was related to birth order in the African case studies, but spacing between births did increase.