The decline of illegitimacy and the control of marital fertility during the demographic transition. Testing the innovation-diffusion hypothesis using cohort fertility data from a Belgian town, 1850-1910

Abstract

One of the major arguments made in the litera ture in support of the view that the European fertility transi tion was the result of the spread of an innovation called con traception, is that illegitimate fertility fell together with marital fertility. Indeed, the parallel decline of both illegiti macy and marital fertility in the final part of the nineteenth century suggests that individuals in Europe were applying new forms of contraceptive behaviour that were previously not done or even unthinkable. The aim of this contribution in to investigate one implication of the argument: if the dif fusion hypothesis is correct, one would expect that women who got children before marriage would be less likely to control their fertility by means of parity-dependent stopping behaviour within marriage than comparable women without premarital births. This hypothesis is investigated with a lo gistic regression model of stopping behaviour using data from three birth cohorts living in the Belgian town of Leu ven between 1850 and 1910. The results indicate that, at least in Leuven, the decline of illegitimacy can at most only partly be explained by the diffusion of innovative contra ceptive behaviour. More than backing up the diffusionist in terpretation, the findings lend particular support to the courtship model of premarital pregnancies and births. The