Stability in intentions to stop childbearing: Evidence from rural Mozambique

In much of sub-Saharan Africa, birth rates are high and individual circumstances are unstable. Given these conditions, some demographers argue that women have difficulty forming long-term fertility plans and thus challenge the utility of reported desires to stop childbearing. But despite these challenges, intentions to stop childbearing have predictive power. We propose that a better assessment of both the empirical and theoretical relevance of fertility intentions requires understanding how intentions change in response to individual circumstances. This paper uses three waves of survey data collected in rural southern Mozambique to study stability and change in the desire to stop childbearing. We apply fixed-effects models to assess the degree to which changes in fertility intentions are shaped by changes in demographic factors, household economic conditions, and health status, controlling for stable individual characteristics. Results suggest that measures of fertility intentions are meaningful, even in unstable high-fertility contexts, and provide further support for the “moving target” model of intentions that has been proposed for low-fertility settings.