Social Revolution : Family Size Shrinking in Brazil

With three children to raise in a cramped, three-room house and mortgage payments eating up a third of her husband’s monthly wage of $120, Regina Maria da Silva, 27, decided it was time to stop having children.

At a private family-planning clinic here the other day, the tired-looking, dark-haired mother, holding a 10-month-old boy in her lap, signed up for a simple sterilization operation.

She was doing something that is becoming increasingly common in Brazil, where an important social revolution seems to be under way.

Brazil, with 135 million people, is the most populous country in Latin America. But now, because of voluntary family planning and increasing acceptance of sterilization by men as well as women, the size of the Brazilian family is shrinking. The rate of population increase is plunging.

Women are assuming a new role in society, displacing men in many jobs. Many are exchanging the role of mother and housekeeper for that of worker in office or factory. Employment seems to be a major factor in controlling population growth.

No Policy Spelled Out

The revolution has taken hold without any policy being spelled out by the government and despite the opposition of vocal sectors of the Roman Catholic Church. And this basic change is taking place in a society infused with machismo and the nationalist notion that the greater the population, the greater the country.

The change has come very fast. Until 1960, Brazilian women averaged 6.2 live births between age 15 and age 49. From 1950 to 1960, the population grew at the rate of 3% a year.

Recent statistics show that the fertility rate has dropped by a third, to an average of 4.3 births per woman. Demographers attribute the decline primarily to the use of contraceptive devices--pills and intrauterine devices are readily available--and to the fact that at least 300,000 women and perhaps 500,000 men are sterilized every year.

Clandestine Abortions

Also, Walter Rodriguez, one of the pioneers in private family-planning clinics here, estimates that, even though abortion is illegal in Brazil, there are 3 million to 5 million clandestine abortions every year.

Increasingly, men are accepting family planning as a way of coping with economic hardship and of achieving better living conditions for their families.

In Rio Claro, a prosperous city of 125,000 in the state of Sao Paulo, Mayor Jose Lincoln Magalhaes, 42 and the father of three children, has set the example. He and his three brothers and three brothers-in-law have all had vasectomies, a simple sterilization operation.

Isto e, a national magazine, said in a cover story on contraception in Brazil that in 44% of Rio Claro’s married couples, at least one of the partners has been sterilized.

As in the rest of Brazil, the operations--mostly tubal ligations in the case of women--were performed at private clinics, often supported by international family-planning groups, or by doctors in social security hospitals, during Caesarean deliveries, at the request of the mothers.

35% Rate for Caesareans

Brazil’s social security hospitals, where pregnant women are treated at minimal cost, registered 787,135 births between January and July this year, and 280,313 of them were by Caesarean. This 35% rate is unusually high, and Isto e quoted medical sources as saying that in many of the cases, sterilization was also performed at the request of the women.

The effects of grass-roots family planning on Brazil’s population trends are showing up in statistics that are vital for economic planners and market analysts.

Edmar Bacha, president of the National Institute of Geography and Statistics, estimates that the annual rate of population growth is now 2%. He foresees a continuing decline, to an annual rate of 1.7% by the end of the century.

If Bacha’s projection is correct, Brazil’s population in the year 2000 will be about 180 million, or 20 million below earlier estimates.

Urban Trend

Even more striking than the decline in expected growth is the change, already in evidence, brought about by smaller families and increased employment outside the home for women. The trend is toward an urban, industrial society, which much of Brazil has become over the last 40 years. Even in the poorest rural areas, the population growth rate has slowed significantly, though more slowly than in urban areas.

The slowing of population growth has also been accompanied by longer life expectancy.

Alexander Jose Periscinoto, a market analyst, said the other day that, on the basis of the trend, life expectancy in Brazil can be expected to increase to 68 years in 1990, up from from 51 years in 1960.

“This means,” he said, “that the average working lifetime has increased from 33 to 50 years, which is a tremendous increase in the country’s work potential.”

Also, he said, Brazil’s women are entering the work force in such numbers that now there are more female than male wage earners.

More Service Jobs

“According to our projections, based on a variety of social and labor statistics, women will occupy 58% of all jobs by the end of this decade,” he said. “The main increase in jobs will be in service and commercial sectors, not in industry or agriculture.”

He said the size of the average family will have dropped from 5.2 people in 1960 to 3.9 in 1990, when there will be 37 million families in Brazil.

He also predicted a strengthening of the urban middle class, in terms of both numbers and income. More than 80% of Brazilians now live in communities of more than 5,000 people. There are 11 cities of more than 1 million people; Sao Paulo has nearly 10 million.

In recent years, wealth has been concentrated increasingly in the hands of a few, the upper 10%, while the lowest income group, representing 50% of the population, has had a declining share of goods and services.

The gross national product, the sum of goods and services produced, will reach $160 billion this year, it is estimated, or about $1,300 per capita. Yet the income gap between the wealthy and the poor here is one of the widest in the world.