Paul Gillingham: evaluation

Transcript context

…To return to population, why is the Mexican total fertility rate now below that of the United States? Much poorer country, right? One thinks of Latin America as having high fertility, but it doesn’t anymore. What’s happened there? This, again, is the product really of two things which we’ve already been covering. One is this really joined-up noncoercive population control of the ’70s and ’80s, which was a global model. Mexico hosted the global conference on this, I think twice or three times. It got a prize from the UN. How could it do this compared to the rest of Latin America? Two things. First of all, by keeping Catholicism out of political life more than almost anywhere else. Whereas you have priests inveighing against the evils of contraception, again, across most other Latin American societies, the revolution and the 19th century before it meant that Mexico has a unique degree of separation of church and state. The church just doesn’t say anything as the government goes about aggressively pushing the pill, condoms, et cetera. At this stage, the obvious question is, okay, well, hold on. The church doesn’t say anything. On a micro level, inside families, conservative people, until the ’70s, the total fertility rate was nearly seven per family. Traditionally, having children, especially male children, is a symbol of success. Economically, it used to be useful to have the spare hands. What changes at a micro level goes back to education. Women who are educated have far more autonomy to say yes to contraception. You see this really clearly in rates of uptake of the pill, which in the ’60s goes through the roof as soon as it’s available. We’ve got surveys from hospitals. People are there. Do you take the pill? Yes or no? Yes, you do. Even in really conservative societies, there’s a village which has been very studied. It’s wonderful, called San Jose de Gracia in the highlands of Jalisco. There, we’ve got this really good qualitative micro study. Women just say yes, actually, we don’t want to have 6.7 children, thank you very much, and so we will use contraception. Sorry to the men, you’re just going to have to like that. Why is that? That globally correlates to primary education and women’s primary education. How many women, for all the flaws, are getting through the doors for those first three years? By the end of the ’60s, it’s 73 percent. Again, go global to what was then a band of middle-income countries; there’s nothing like it. Now, most historians of Mexico, they’re not British, and you are. Where were you from in Britain, and how do you think that’s shaped how you read Mexican history?…

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