By Cristina M. Bautista
IN the decade prior to the passage of the Philippine reproductive-health law in 2012, the country had seen an acrimonious debate over the use of family planning. Even with the passage of the law, public discussion remains a sensitive matter. Government data shows a strong association between family size and poverty, hence the importance of closely studying the Philippine population trends, patterns and composition. On a micro level, studying population inevitably brings up gender issues. One of the issues in this case is that Filipino men generally prefer to have more children than Filipino women.
More often than not, families—especially those belonging to the low-income groups—are not able to meet their desired family size. It has been argued by previous studies that higher fertility among the poor is often attributed to inadequate women’s education and lack of access or ineffective use of family planning among the poor. There is less attribution for gender-based influence or “relative power” on total fertility in economic studies.
Most of these studies in intra-household reproductive decision making assume what microeconomic theory calls a unitary household framework. Such framework comes from the traditional perspective that the welfare of the household is largely determined by a household head. Associated with Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker, the unitary household framework has become the mainstream economic model for analyzing the family.
When it comes to the determination of factors affecting intra-household decisions, the availability of data often constrains a researcher to use either the perspective of only the woman or the man. Given such data availability, the unitary household framework is used to analyze research problems, like what factors determine household decisions in the allocation of resources and time use, as well as planning the composition and size of the family. There is always the presumption that family welfare is paramount to the household head.
In the 1990s, there emerged an alternative school of thought in economics that challenged the primacy of the unitary household framework. Referred to as the collective household decision-making, this school looks at intra-household decisions as products of collective decisions of the spouses. Those who contributed to the development of this analytical framework were economists Martin Browning, Pierre-Andre Chiappori and Francois Bourguignon.
There are indications that gender-based power may, in fact, influence family-planning use in the Philippines. Some studies have found relatively high levels of spousal disagreement among Filipinos in certain aspects of family planning. The resolution of such disagreements may reflect asymmetry in the balance of power.
Fortunately, in 2003 the Philippine National Demographic and Health Survey included for the first time a separate questionnaire for male respondents such that a subsample of the national survey consisted of at least 2,000 matched couples. This allowed the pursuit of research investigating intra-household reproductive decisions on the basis of the “bargaining power” of man and woman or put another way, the factors that affect the distribution of spousal influence or power in reproductive decisions. The advantage of using the collective model is that it is an economic theory that has the flexibility to accommodate gender-related variables.
In order to determine the relative power of the partners in the family- planning decision, I classified the different family-planning methods, determining the factors that influence their use. The groupings were: (1) women-only methods, such as pills, intrauterine device and injection, which can be used by the wife with or without the knowledge or consent of the husband; (2) couple-participation methods, such as the use of condom, rhythm and withdrawal; and (3) irreversible method (sterilization) that requires the written consent of the person and, in some cases, even the spouse.
Here are major interesting findings using some statistical tests. Financial and other types of support from extended family, like parents-in-law, tends to discourage the use of women only-based contraception, as well as sterilization. The wife’s social capital, proxied by her discussion of family planning with people other than her husband, has a positive influence on all three types of family-planning methods. The wife’s exposure to media information on family planning tends to make her use women-based contraception over couples-based method. In contrast, the man’s exposure to media information positively works to encourage them to use couple-based methods.
It was also seen that the more educated the wife is relative to her husband, the more likely she would use women-only based methods.
The research is an attempt to empirically model family-planning decision factors using the collective household framework, an economic perspective that incorporates the distribution of relative influence or power between spouses on intra-household decisions. Results can be further reviewed as it opens another avenue in population research.