The shrinking family. The seven children of 61-year-old Maria do Livramento Braz of Rio are a reminder of Brazil's once high fertitlity rate. The number of kids per woman has plummeted since the 1960s. Working class families now aspire to the middle clas lifestyle and family size of Maria Correa de Oliveira, a Rio psychoanalyst. She and her husband have only Henrique,8, and Diana, 12.
José Alberto, who had been fishing
all morning at the pond on his ranch, was still in his sweatpants. His mother's
front room in the mid-Brazil town of São Vicente de Minas was just big enough
to contain three crowded-in armchairs, a television, numerous family photos,
framed drawings of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin, and the black vinyl couch upon
which he, Professor Carvalho, retiring head of his university's School of
Economics and one of the most eminent Brazilian demographers of the past half
century, now reclined. He put his feet up and smiled. He knew the total number
of grandchildren, of course: 26. For much of his working life, he had been
charting and probing and writing about the remarkable Brazilian demographic
phenomenon that was replicated in miniature amid his own family, who within two
generations had crashed their fertility rate to 2.36 children per family,
heading right down toward the national average of 1.9.
Agirl takes a solo spin on her shiny pink bicyles in Sao Paolo's ibirapuera Park. Among comparable population, only China, with its one-child rule, has seen as dramatic a drop in its fertility rate as Brazil. The difference? Brazil's decline was driven by women's choices, not state policy
That new Brazilian fertility rate is
below the level at which a population replaces itself. It is lower than the
two-children-per-woman fertility rate in the United States. In the largest
nation in Latin America—a 191-million-person country where the Roman Catholic
Church dominates, abortion is illegal (except in rare cases), and no official
government policy has ever promoted birth control—family size has dropped so
sharply and so insistently over the past five decades that the fertility rate
graph looks like a playground slide.
And it's not simply wealthy and
professional women who have stopped bearing multiple children in Brazil.
There's a common perception that the countryside and favelas, as Brazilians
call urban slums, are still crowded with women having one baby after
another—but it isn't true. At the demographic center Carvalho helped found,
located four hours away in the city of Belo Horizonte, researchers have tracked
the decline across every class and region of Brazil. Over some weeks of talking
to Brazilian women recently, I met schoolteachers, trash sorters, architects,
newspaper reporters, shop clerks, cleaning ladies, professional athletes, high
school girls, and women who had spent their adolescence homeless; almost every
one of them said a modern Brazilian family should include two children, ideally
a casal, or couple, one boy and one girl. Three was barely plausible.
One might well be enough. In a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of
Belo Horizonte, an unmarried 18-year-old affectionately watched her toddler son
one evening as he roared his toy truck toward us; she loved him very much, the
young woman said, but she was finished with childbearing. The expression she
used was one I'd heard from Brazilian women before: "A fábrica está
fechada." The factory is closed.
Power Women
In a scene from Ribeirao do Tempo, a policewoman grills a developement company's CEO. Like these TV characters, Brazilian women are gaining ground on male turf. The country elected Dilma Rousseff as its first female president last year.
The emphatic fertility drop is not
just a Brazilian phenomenon. Notwithstanding concerns over the planet's growing
population, close to half the world's population lives in countries where the
fertility rates have actually fallen to below replacement rate, the level at
which a couple have only enough children to replace themselves—just over two
children per family. They've dropped rapidly in most of the rest of the world
as well, with the notable exception of sub-Saharan Africa.
For demographers working to
understand the causes and implications of this startling trend, what's happened
in Brazil since the 1960s provides one of the most compelling case studies on
the planet. Brazil spans a vast landmass, with enormous regional differences in
geography, race, and culture, yet its population data are by tradition
particularly thorough and reliable. Pieces of the Brazilian experience have
been mirrored in scores of other countries, including those in which most of
the population is Roman Catholic—but no other nation in the world seems to have
managed it quite like this.
The Soap Opera Effect
Ninety percent of female characters in the average novela have just one child or none, which may have influenced Brazilian women to desire samller families. But the scripts didn't intentionally encourage low fertility. Rather, early novela writers sought to subtly undermine the dictatorship that ran Brazil until 1985, using story line that critiqued traditional values and empowered women.
"What took 120 years in England
took 40 years here," Carvalho told me one day. "Something happened."
At that moment he was talking about what happened in São Vicente de Minas, the
town of his childhood, where nobody under 45 has a soccer-team-size roster of
siblings anymore. But he might as well have been describing the entire female
population of Brazil. For although there are many reasons Brazil's fertility
rate has dropped so far and so fast, central to them all are tough, resilient
women who set out a few decades back, without encouragement from the government
and over the pronouncements of their bishops, to start shutting down the
factories any way they could.
Encountering women under 35 who've
already had sterilization surgery is an everyday occurrence in Brazil, and they
seem to have no compunctions about discussing it. "I was 18 when the first
baby was born—wanted to stop there, but the second came by accident, and I am done,"
a 28-year-old crafts shop worker told me in the northeastern city of Recife, as
she was showing me how to dance the regional two-step called the forró.
She was 26 when she had her tubal ligation, and when I asked why she'd chosen
irreversible contraception at such a young age—she's married, what if she and
her husband change their minds?—she reminded me of son number two, the
accident. Birth control pills made her fat and sick, she said. And in case I'd
missed this part: She was done.
A boutique in Ipanema
Rising Consumerism
Not every Brazillian can indulge in expensive fashions and cosmetic dintistry. But a booming economy means more buying power for all.
So why two? Why not four? Why not
the eight your grandmother had? Always the same answer—"Impossible! Too
expensive! Too much work!" With the facial expression, the widened eyes
and the startled grin that I came to know well: It's the 21st century, senhora,
are you nuts?
Population scholars like José
Alberto Carvalho maintain a lively argument about the multiple components of
Brazil's fertility plunge. ("Don't let anybody tell you they know for sure
what caused the decline," a demographer advised me at Cedeplar, the
university-based study center in Belo Horizonte. "We'll never have a
winner as the best explanation.") But if one were to try composing a
formula for crashing a developing nation's fertility rate without official
intervention from the government—no China-style one-child policy, no
India-style effort to force sterilization upon the populace—here's a six-point
plan, tweaked for the peculiarities of modern Brazil:
1. Industrialize dramatically,
urgently, and late, causing your nation to hurtle through in 25 years what
economists used to think of as a century's worth of internal rural-to-urban
relocation of its citizens. Brazil's military rulers, who seized power in a
1964 military coup and held on through two decades of sometimes brutal
authoritarian rule, forced the country into a new kind of economy, one that has
concentrated work in the cities, where the housing is cramped, the favela
streets are dangerous, babies look more like new expense burdens than like future
useful farmhands, and the jobs women must take for their families' survival
require leaving home for ten hours at a stretch.
2. Keep your medications mostly
unregulated and your pharmacy system over-the-counter, so that when birth
control pills hit the world in the early 1960s, women of all classes can get
their hands on them, even without a doctor's prescription, if they can just
come up with the money. Nurture in these women a particularly dismissive
attitude toward the Catholic Church's position on artificial contraception.
(See number 4.)
3. Improve your infant and child
mortality statistics until families no longer feel compelled to have extra,
just-in-case babies on the supposition that a few will die young. Compound that
reassurance with a national pension program, relieving working-class parents of
the conviction that a big family will be their only support when they grow old.
4. Distort your public health
system's financial incentives for a generation or two, so that doctors learn
they can count on higher pay and more predictable work schedules when they
perform cesareans rather than waiting for natural deliveries. Then spread the
word, woman to woman, that a public health doctor who has already begun the
surgery for a cesarean can probably be persuaded to throw in a discreet tubal
ligation, thus ensuring a thriving, decades-long publicly supported gray market
for this permanent method of contraception. Brazil's health system didn't
formally recognize voluntary female sterilization until 1997. But the first
time I ever heard the phrase "a fábrica está fechada," it was from a
69-year-old retired schoolteacher who had her tubes tied in 1972, after her
third child was born. This woman had three sisters. Every one of them underwent
a ligation. Yes, they were all Catholic. Yes, the church hierarchy disapproved.
No, none of them much cared; they were women of faith, but in some matters the
male clergy is perhaps not wholly equipped to discern the true will of God. The
lady was pouring tea into china cups at her dining table as we talked, and her
voice was matter-of-fact. "Everyone was doing it," she said.
5. Introduce electricity and
television at the same time in much of the nation's interior, a double
disruption of traditional family living patterns, and then flood the airwaves
with a singular, vivid, aspirational image of the modern Brazilian family:
affluent, light skinned, and small. Scholars have tracked the apparent
family-size-shrinking influence of novelas, Brazil's Portuguese-language
iterations of the beloved evening soap operas, or telenovelas, that
broadcast all over Latin America, each playing for months, like an endless
series of bodice-ripper paperbacks. One study observes that the spread of
televisions outpaced access to education, which has greatly improved in Brazil,
but at a slower pace. By the 1980s and '90s all of Brazil was dominated by the
Globo network, whose prime-time novelas were often a central topic of
conversation; even now, in the era of multichannel satellite broadcasting, you can
see café TVs turned to the biggest Globo novela of the season.
While I was there it was Passione,
featuring the racked-by-secrets industrialist Gouveia family, who were all very
good-looking and loaded up with desirable possessions: motorcycles, chandeliers,
racing bicycles, airplane tickets, French high-heeled shoes. The widow
Gouveia, resolute and admirable, had three kids. Well, four, but one was a
secret because he was born out of wedlock and had been shipped off to Italy in
infancy because … uh, never mind. The point is that there were not many
Gouveias, nor were there big families anywhere else in the unfathomably
complicated plotline.
"We asked them once: 'Is the
Globo network trying to introduce family planning on purpose?'" says Elza
Berquó, a veteran Brazilian demographer who helped study the novelas' effects.
"You know what they answered? 'No. It's because it's much easier to write
the novelas about small families.'"
And, finally, number 6: Make all
your women Brazilians.
Thirteen-year-old Rebeca da Silva's violin hums with promise in a Rio slum, or favela, thanks to a scholarship program called Acao social pela Musica. Access to education is improving, with 85% of Brazilian teen girls now enrolled in high school.
This is volatile territory, Brazil
and women. Machismo means the same thing in the Portuguese of Brazil as it does
in the rest of the continent's Spanish, and it has been linked to the country's
high levels of domestic violence and other physical assaults on women. But the
nation was profoundly altered by the movimento das mulheres, the women's
movement of the 1970s and '80s, and no American today is in a position to call
Brazil retrograde on matters of gender equity. When President Dilma Rousseff
was running for office last year, the fiercest national debates were about her
political ideas and affiliations, not whether the nation was ready for its
first female president. One of Rousseff's strongest competitors, in fact—a
likely contender in future elections—was a female senator.
The Cytotec episode offers sober but
illuminating evidence. Cytotec is the brand name for a medication called
misoprostol, which was developed as an ulcer treatment but in the late 1980s
became internationally known as an early-abortion pill—part of the two-drug
combination that included the medication known as RU-486. Even before the rest
of the world received the news about pill-induced abortion, though—it entered
the French and Chinese marketplaces in 1988, amid great controversy, and was
subsequently approved in the U.S. for pregnancy termination—Brazilian women had
figured it out on their own. No publicity campaign explained misoprostol; this
was pre-Internet, remember, and Brazilian law prohibits abortion except in
cases of rape or risk to the woman's life.
One woman's Dream
Marcela Goncalo pessoa,24, works as a maid for a wealthy woman whose extravagant Recife apartment looks like a set for one of the novelas she watches nightly
Each Morning she dresses up for the hour-long bus commute from her one-bedroom apartment in the city's low-income outskirts,
glued to Ti-ti-ti with her husband and sister
Working From Home
Money and space are tight in Rocinha, Rio's largest favela, but the Coopa-Roca crafts cooperative lets moms like Liliane Mineira da Silva (with Beatriz,6, and Vitoria,8) earn income while caring for their children.
But that law is ignored at every level
of society. "Women were telling each other what the dose was," says
Brazilian demographer Sarah Costa, director of the New York City-based Women's
Refugee Commission, who has written about Brazil's Cytotec phenomenon for the
medical journal the Lancet. "There were street vendors selling it
in train stations. Most public health posts at that time were not providing
family planning services, and if you are motivated to regulate your fertility,
even if you have poor services and poor information, you'll ask somebody, What
can I do? And the information will flow."
The open availability of Cytotec
didn't last long. By 1991 the Brazilian government had put restrictions on it;
today it is available only in hospitals, although women assured me that packs
of Cytotec could still be obtained over the Internet or in certain flea
markets. But the public health service now pays for sterilizations and other
methods of birth control. Illegal abortion flourishes, in circumstances ranging
from medically reliable to scary. It may not be entirely easy or safe for a
Brazilian woman to keep her family small, but there's no shortage of available
ways to do so. And in every respect, women of all ages told me, this is what
they now expect of themselves—and what contemporary Brazil, in turn, appears to
expect from them.
"Look at the apartments,"
said a 31-year-old Rio de Janeiro marketing executive named Andiara Petterle.
"They're designed for a maximum of four people. Two bedrooms. In the
supermarkets, even the labels on frozen foods—always for four people."
The company Petterle founded
specializes in sales research on Brazilian women, whose buying habits and life
priorities seem to have been upended just in the years since Petterle was born.
It wasn't until 1977, she reminded me, that the nation legalized divorce.
"We've changed so fast," she said. "We've found that for many
young women, their first priority now is their education. The second is their
profession. And the third is children and a stable relationship."
So raising children hasn't vanished
from these modern priorities, Petterle said—it's just lower on the list, and a
tougher thing to juggle now. She has no children herself, although she hopes to
someday. As Petterle talked, I heard what was becoming a familiar refrain: Contemporary
Brazilian life is too expensive to accommodate more than two kids. Much of the
public school system is ruim—useless, a disaster—people will tell you,
and families scrape for any private education they can afford. The nationwide
health system is ruim too, many insist, and families scrape for any private
medical care they can afford. Clothing, books, backpacks, cell phones—all these
things are costly, and all must somehow be obtained. And everything a young
family might need is now available, as the mall windows relentlessly remind
passing customers, with financiamento, short- or long-term.
Justice for Women
Because sexual harassment persists in Brazil's machismo culture, Rio's subway offer females-only cars,where a guard keeps men out. A Recife activist participates in a vigil demanding an end to violence against women
Want your child to have that huge
stuffed beagle, that dolly set in the fancy gift box, that four-foot-long,
battery-powered, ride-on SUV? Buy it on the installment plan—with interest, of
course. Consumer credit has exploded throughout Brazil, reaching middle- and
working-class families that two decades ago had no access to these kinds of
discretionary purchases paid off over time. While I was in Brazil, the business
magazine Exame ran a cover story on the nation's new multi-class
consumerism. The São Paulo journalist who wrote the story, Fabiane Stefano,
described the bustle she witnessed inside a travel agency that had recently
opened in a downscale city neighborhood. "Every five minutes a new person
came in," she said. "Eighty percent of these people were going to the
Northeast to see family. It takes three days to get there by bus, only three
hours by plane." This was each customer's first time flying. "The guy
had to explain to them that in an airplane they wouldn't see their luggage for
a while."
Brazilian culture is famous for its sexuality-and for its bikinis, like these on display at an upscale Ipanema boutique. But with many women choosing sterilization after a couple of kids, sexuality and fertility have become uncoupled in Brazil.
It would be a gross
oversimplification to suggest that Brazilians are having fewer children just
because they want to spend more money on each one. But these questions about
material acquisition—how much everything now costs, and how much everyone now
desires—both interested and troubled nearly every Brazilian woman I met.
Smaller family size has been credited with helping boost the economies of
rapidly developing countries, especially the mammoth five now referred to as
BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. National economic growth
brings no assurances of family well-being, though, unless that prosperity is
managed thoughtfully and invested in coming generations. "This is
something I've been thinking about, the way we're dropping the fertility rate
in Brazil and the other BRICS countries, but I don't see any real work on
getting more ethical," says the marketer Andiara Petterle. "We could be
just one billion people in the world, and with the mentality we have
now, we could be consuming just as many resources."
The morning I had coffee with a
group of young São Paulo professional women, we sat at a sidewalk table across
from a shop that carried eight different glossy parenting magazines. Each was
thick with ads: the Bébé Confort Modulo Clip convertible stroller; the
electronic "cry analyzer" to identify the reason your baby is crying;
the wall-mounted DVD player that projects moving images over the crib
("Distracts better than a mobile!"). We studied the fashion
photographs of beautiful toddlers in knits and aviator sunglasses and fake
furs. "Look at these kids," said Milene Chaves, a 33-year-old
journalist, her voice hovering between admiration and despair. She turned the
page. "And it seems you have to have a decorated room too. I don't need a
decorated room like this."
Chaves had a long-term boyfriend but
has no children, not yet. "And when I do, I want to simplify things,"
she said. The half dozen friends around her agreed, the magazines still open on
the table before us: attractive objects, they said, but so excessive, so
disturbingly too much. These São Paulo women were in their 20s and 30s, with
two children or one or none. They followed precisely the patterns described to
me by national demographers. When I asked them whether they ever felt nostalgia
for the less materialistic life of their elders, two generations back—eight
children here, ten there, with nobody expecting decorators to gussy up the
sleeping quarters—I was able to make out, among the hooting, the word presa.
Imprisoned.
But their answers were nearly
drowned out by their laughter.
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