Family during and after a crisis

Anonymous said...
Ferfal, since we're on the topic of weddings, did you notice if a lot of women were getting pregnant and having babies during 2002 and 2003 in Argentina? This seems to be a big thing in the US, many many women are now pregnant, and there are even ads on Craigslist and other online classifieds looking for "sperm donors".

A lot of these women seem to be unmarried and even have a couple kids already. The pregnancy boom here has been commented on a lot by internet pundits, and many men have said that it is illogical for women to want a baby during an economic crash, albeit a mild one. Yet women seem intent on getting pregnant.

I know that you and your wife were married soon after the collapse, so it was sort of natural to start a family, but I'm talking about women who have little in the way of steady salary having babies.

The weird thing is that there was a dip in pregnancies during the oil crisis in the 70s, since I was concieved during the 1973 embargo and my school classes were always the smallest, but now there seems to be a pregnancy boom.

More people are getting married. Specially among middle class, its also viewed as a way of formalizing the relationship and saving money on rent and other expenses.
Specially among the poor, there’s also a reduction in age of sexual initiation and lots of teen moms. This goes hand to hand with poverty and lack of education typical of a severe crisis.
Having said that, there’s even less young moms having babies, mostly because they can’t afford to have them, or to have as many kids as they once did, so the birth rate has gone slightly down the last 3 years in Argenitna.

In a certain way, it’s also true that during hard times people fall back to family for support both physical (going back to live with the parents, or families living under a same roof) and emotional as well.
Some women put their carriers before family (having kids) during a recession where there’s little room to grow professionally motherhood become more appealing to these type of women as well.
The amount of women looking to be single mothers (either through sperm donors or informal relationships) also grew as well.

FerFAL