fertility

1. The condition, quality, or degree of being fertile.
2. The birthrate of a population.

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The French word ‘fertilité’ entered the English language in 1490 to characterize the richness of the soil. By the seventeenth century, writers adapted ‘fertility’ to describe creative imaginations. In the course of the nineteenth century, the term ‘fertility’ came to account for the number of children a woman bore. In this period, too, fertility and another French term, ‘fécundité’, were used to refer to female procreative abilities. In 1866 J. M. Duncan differentiated fecundity from fertility with this explanation: ‘… by fecundity I mean the demonstrated capability to bear children … fertility implies fecundity, and also introduces the idea of number of progeny’ (The Oxford English Dictionary, 1989, 2nd edn). After 1866, especially among demographers, fertility increasingly came to refer to the number of live children a woman delivered.

Technically, fertility simply denotes successful production of offspring. This requires the development in the potential parents of mature eggs (ova) and sperm, sexual intercourse, the opportune encounter between sperm and egg in the woman's body, fertilization, implantation of the embryo in the uterus, successful antenatal development, and a safe birth. In the human female, the opportunity for fertilization lasts only a day or two following ovulation (the release of an ovum), which occurs about every 28 days, in the middle of the menstrual cycle. Sperm are present in vast numbers in the semen, so that, despite many hazards along the way, some survive the necessary journey to the egg. Given the typical frequency of coitus between habitual partners of reproductive age, the odds are in favour of pregnancy occurring within a few months of the first encounter, in the absence of contraception or any specific physical cause for infertility.

Fertility, however, is not simply the expression of a woman's bodily capacity to procreate (fecundity). Recent anthropological and feminist theory advocates understanding fertility as the product of individual actions situated within a particular historical and cultural context. Women and men, responding to local and global changes in the political economy and available resources (e.g. social networks, abortifacients, and contraceptives), act as individuals to produce the family arrangement they prefer (Greenhalgh 1995).

Women and men promote or control their fertility to meet particular needs and concerns at different moments in their life cycle, and these needs and concerns alter depending upon their sexual partner and the changing circumstances of their lives. A woman might attempt, for example, to limit her fertility with an extramarital partner, but not her spouse. Or a widow might attempt to control her fertility after her husband's death in her attempt to retain a particular social standing in her community or limit the economic strains on her household.

People negotiate the circumstances of their fertility differently according to their social position and their personal needs, interests, and concerns. In many societies, bearing a child grants a woman adult status in her community, provides her with a legitimate place in the adult community, and garners her political power in her household and sometimes in her community. The desire to have a child has led many women who wish to conceive to seek the assistance of herbalists, ritual experts, and clinics. The efficacy of fertility treatments depends not only on the male and female partners' reproductive capacities, but also on their financial ability to pay for the treatment and the quality of the drug or procedure. Places where women and men can have their fecundity tested and treated abound throughout the world.

The desire to limit fertility exists in concert with the wish to procreate, and many women experience both desires in their lifetimes. Women in countries around the world seek contraceptives and abortions to limit their fertility, with or without the consent of their partners. A recent study by Bledsoe and colleagues in West Africa, for example, found that some women who have just had a miscarriage elect to use contraceptives for a period to give their bodies a chance to recuperate before they choose to become pregnant again.

Beyond individual preferences, however, fertility responds to a number of factors. Chief among them are health, nutrition and environmental factors. A woman's nutritional status, age, and experience of disease contribute to the probability of subfecundity (reduced capacity to conceive), miscarriages, and stillbirths. The tragedy experienced by residents of the Love Canal, New York State, where unsuspecting families lived on toxic waste dumps, provides an example of how environmental hazards have increased the incidence of miscarriage.

Cultural and religious values relating to the onset and duration of sexual relationships, use of contraceptives, and frequency of coitus (with a fecund male), determine a woman's exposure to the possibility of pregnancy. Obviously, women who begin their reproductive careers immediately after the onset of puberty have a greater window of opportunity to experience pregnancy than women who delay childbearing. Additionally, women in societies that condone the sexual relationships of women before, between, and after marriages could feel more comfortable being pregnant during more of their childbearing years than women living in less open communities. However, the ease with which a women can contract sexual liaisons does not directly translate into a socially sanctioned pregnancy and birth. Experiences of miscarriages and the duration of breastfeeding are also factors in the time during which a woman can get pregnant. The longer the breastfeeding period, the longer the possibility of lactational amenorrhoea — the time when a women is unlikely to be ovulating and therefore to get pregnant. Referred to as the ‘proximate determinants of fertility’ by demographers, myriad factors impinge on a woman's reproductive experiences.

Governmental programmes and policies that attempt to limit or promote women's fertility also affect the number of children a woman bears. For example, China's urban policy of one child per family sends a strong message to the community about the importance of controlling fertility. In contrast, when a country limits women's access to contraceptives or abortion, as some states in the US do, some women are forced to bear children they are not able to raise.

Women's fertility outcomes are also a response to international pressures. The economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s that plagued many African countries forced many Africans into extreme poverty. The recognition that poverty limits a woman's or couple's ability to care for many children leads women and men to limit the number of children they have. In Kenya, for example, where an unstable government is unable to pay international debts and secure internal peace, demographic studies conducted during the 1990s linked the decline of women's fertility to the current economic crisis. Kenyan women and men faced with growing uncertainty in their everyday lives are electing to limit their fertility.

— Sheryl A. McCurdy

Bibliography

• Bledsoe, C., Bahja, F., Hill, A. G. (1998) Reproductive mishaps and Western contraception: an African challenge to fertility theory. Population and development review. 24 (1), 15-59.
• Greenhalgh, S. (ed) (1995). Situating fertility: anthropology and demographic inquiry. Cambridge University Press.
• King, M. (1990). All in the family? The incompatibility and reconciliation of family demography and family history. Historical Methods, 23 (1), 32.
• Levine, D. (1987). Reproducing families: the political economy of England's population history. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, New York

See also conception; contraception; fertility rites; infertility; pregnancy.

noun

The quality or state of being fertile: fecundity, fruitfulness, productiveness, productivity, prolificacy, prolificness, richness. See rich/poor.

Definition: readiness to bear, produce
Antonyms: aridity, childlessness, emptiness, infertility, sterility

The ability to reproduce.

The level of childbearing; in an individual, but more often in a society or nation. Crude birth rate is the simplest and commonest measure of fertility, but it does not relate the number of births to the number of women of childbearing age. For this reason, other measurements are used, such as the general fertility rate, or fertility ratio, which shows the number of births in a year per 1000 women of reproductive age, generally given as being between 15 and 45 (sometimes this is given as 15 to 49). Cohort fertility rates survey the number of births to women grouped either according to their year of birth or their year of marriage.

Fertility rates vary widely globally; the rate for the UK, 1990, was 1.8, as compared with 7.0 for Malawi. Reasons for variations in fertility include availability of land in rural societies, death rate, public health programmes, access to birth control, income, female employment opportunities, industrialization, modernization, and customs of age at marriage, celibacy, and inheritance. Fertility has been declining in industrial societies since the late nineteenth century; a decline which preceded easily available artificial contraception. There are very strong global correlations between fertility rates and per capita GNP, and between fertility rates and women's education, and infant mortality rates (Jhamba, Geography 84).

While Western Europe witnessed a fractional increase in fertility in the late 1970s and early 1980s, fertility rates have declined consistently since then.

The central theory of Frazer's The Golden Bought was that much European folklore preserved rituals from archaic vegetation cults, in which men and women ensured fertility of trees and crops by having sexual intercourse at seasonal festivals; also, that this fertility corresponded magically to the virility of the local king or chief priest, who would be killed and replaced while still in the prime of life, to guard against any risk of impotence. This did not convince anthropologists (Ackerman, 1987), but had a huge impact on novelists, popular writers, and journalists throughout the 20th century, as its bloodthirsty and sexual content gave it great appeal. Of all the Victorian mythological theories it is the only one still remembered; it has been so widely publicized that performers themselves now often believe their local custom to be ‘a fertility rite’, and say as much to enquirers. Certainly, bawdy humour is common in festive contexts, but for this very reason is more likely to be spontaneous, rather than a ritual survival from a remote culture.

Among agricultural customs actually recorded in England, some do explicitly aim at ensuring success for crops or fishing (see Plough Monday, wassailing apple trees), and many others bring a more vague and general good luck, and/or joyfully celebrate natural processes such as the return of spring or the completion of harvest.

For beliefs concerning human fertility, see CERNE ABBAS, CONCEPTION.

The power to support vegetation and bring forth the young of living creatures was, in different Celtic traditions, dispersed between sacred objects and different personalities. The cauldron often implies fertility in different Celtic traditions. Female deities may foster fertility more often than male deities, but either gender may pertain; there is no one fertility-god or goddess. Rosmerta appears to be a fertility-goddess, and aspects of the representations of Cernunnos imply fertility functions. The Romano-Gaulish trinity known as Matres are both fertile mothers and virgins. Other figures associated with fertility include Aacute;ine (1), Brigit, Cymidei Cymeinfoll, the Dagda, and Dôn. The Fomorians of Ireland's pseudo-history Lebor Gabála. [Book of Invasions] have associations both with blight and with fertility.

The capacity to conceive or to induce conception. In commercial animals includes the ability to reproduce prolifically which can be defined in terms of expectations for each species; there is a continuous spectrum from very high to very low or absent fertility. See also infertility.

• f. index — takes into account pregnancy rate to first service, services per conception, calving to conception interval, culling rate.

Quotes:

"I'm hurt, hurt and humiliated beyond endurance, seeing the wheat ripening, the fountains never ceasing to give water, the sheep bearing hundreds of lambs, the she-dogs, until it seems the whole country rises to show me its tender sleeping young while I feel two hammer-blows here instead of the mouth of my child." - Federico Garcia Lorca

"Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life's over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness." - Ursula K. Le Guin

"The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood." - Germaine Greer

"I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives." - Annie Dillard