Fertility decline in a traditional society : a case of Bali

Abstract

In the late 1970s a number of reports indicated that the Indonesian Family Planning Program had contributed to a rapid and substantial fertility decline in Bali. The high fertility setting in Bali into which the program was introduced around 1970, did not appear to be conducive to a small family norm and thus to such a fertility decline. Socially, Bali was still effectively traditional; economically, there had been little development in the areas usually considered, in demographic transition theory, prerequisite for fertility decline. This thesis describes a village study undertaken to examine the questions of the apparent changes in fertility, and the apparent dramatic rise in family planning use; and if such changes were verified, to attempt to elucidate the underlying reasons. The study is based primarily on a survey of 1,088 ever-married women aged 15 to 54 years in three villages in the traditional regency of Klungkung, Bali. The findings are that fertility in these villages had indeed fallen dramatically, from a total fertility rate of 6.5 in the late 1960s to 3.5 in the late 1970s. During this period family planning prevalence had increased from less than 5 percent to around 50 percent of eligible couples. The analysis indicates that almost all the fertility decline was the result of program family planning use. The virtual absence of differentials in both fertility and family planning use led to a conclusion emphasizing the critical importance of Balinese cultural factors in the rapidity of the uptake of family planning, and the subsequent change in fertility behaviour. While credit is given to the family planning program for efficient implementation, the conclusion is that the Balinese communities readily accepted the concept of family planning and fertility limitation as a potentially fruitful approach to alleviate the current problems of limited resources, particularly land, and to achieve the aspirations stemming from the modernizing changes of recent years.