“By God’s grace I had a boy”.
Since the 1960s, when it became evident that the Third World,[76] Sub-Saharan Africa particularly, was undergoing a population transition different from the ‘overdeveloped’[77] Western world, there has been a sustained interest in population growth and later fertility trends in the sub-region (Easterlin 1975). However, among this amazingly large body of literature, work produced by scholars on the continent, and especially work by feminist scholars, has not generally made its way into the dominant discourses.
This state of affairs is but a reflection of the cultural hegemony that has dictated the population agenda. Much of the early discourse is framed around excessive population growth, which was seen as a major cause of poverty. The lowering of fertility was, and still is, expected to promote prosperity; in other words the discourse surrounding fertility remains inherently neo-Malthusian.[78] Knowledge, Attitude and Practices (KAP) surveys, mainly the World Fertility Surveys (WFS) and later the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) were carried out to assess attitudes related to family size and fertility-related behaviour, and the results were used to document several demographic phenomena, including the existence of an ‘unmet need’ for family planning services in Third World countries, and hence a
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