Akosua Adomako Ampofo

not have a joint ‘unmet need’ because they have discrepant preferences (Dodoo et al. 1977).[90]

It would seem obvious that individuals’ and couples’ decision making about whether to have a child, and when, may be influenced, at least in part, by the gen­der-power relations that pertain. Yet, while the sociological and anthropological literature on marriage and the family is replete with studies of power differences between spouses in the area of decision making, since gender differences are not what demographers traditionally sought to explain, the input of feminist dis­course in population and fertility studies has been minimal (Watkins 1993). Susan Watkins (1993) carried out a study of articles on population-related issues in the official journal of the Population Association of America, Demography, from 1964 through to 1992, and found that while women’s fertility behaviour forms the fo­cus of research, few articles pay attention to cultural or women’s concerns, nor to the relative well-being of women and men. When the focus on women’s position and well-being entered the discourse it did not come without challenge. Harriet Presser (1997) comments on Charles Westoff’s article in the New York Times Mag­azine, in which he argues that the feminist agenda is a divisive issue in the popu­lation field. He rightly notes the feminist agenda as including “women’s rights; making women the subjects and not the objects of population policies.. .the in­adequacies of reproductive and women’s health services in general.. .the empow­erment of women in the economic, social and political arenas” (Westoff 1995:178—179). Yet, while he acknowledges these as legitimate concerns, he ar­gues, “they (feminists) ignore or minimize population growth and its presumed consequences.” (Westoff 1995:179). According to him the ‘real problems’ to fem­inists are “gender inequality and poverty” while in his view the “real problems are population growth in less developed countries which threatens the basic condi­tion of life” (Westoff 1995:181). By locating such a distinction Presser argues that Westoff sets up a spurious “opposition between gender and population issues.” (Presser 1997:315).

The manifestation of power within the marital dyad is evidenced by the ability to influence decision-making and behaviour according to one’s wishes (advance one’s objective position) even when this may be detrimental to the other partner. The gap in the discourse on fertility behaviour exists partly because the large fer­tility data sources used for reproductive behaviour analyses do not elicit informa­tion on gender relations or decision-making power, in itself an outcome of how fertility behaviour has generally been conceptualised within demography. When disagreements between spouses have been argued in relation to women’s ‘unmet need’ the implicit assumption has essentially been that men are pronatalist and de­sire more children than women (Kannae and Pendleton 1994; Khalifa 1988; Mus­tafa and Mumford 1984) hence men prevent women from using modern contra-

Whose ‘Unmet Need’ Dis/Agreement about Childbearing among Ghanaian Couples

ceptives. Alternatively, men are said to be opposed to modern contraception (supposedly out of fears that their wives will be unfaithful). Analysis of what hap­pens when the situation is reversed, that is when a man wants his wife to practise family planning (he has an ‘unmet need’) but his wife wants more children, does not appear in the literature. Yet abortion statistics have been described as indicat­ing the ultimate ‘unmet need’ for family planning (Coeytaux 1992). What we also do not know is the extent to which men persuade, coerce, or even force their part­ners to have an abortion because the men have an ‘unmet need’. I return to this in my analysis and discussion.