Potter Abstract

“Below Replacement Fertility in Brazil:  Should We Have Seen it Coming?” (with Paula Miranda-Ribeiro [Federal University of Minas Gerais])

Ten years ago, we conducted an interdisciplinary investigation of the influence of television on family values and reproductive behavior among, mainly, low-income Brazilians.  The communities we studied were a small town in the interior of the Northeast, a favela in the city of São Paulo, and a mid-size city in a remote part of the state of Minas Gerais.  Our research focused on values related to family, virginity, sexuality, marriage, gender relations and consumerism, and how mass media played a role in transforming them in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.  There were two main tensions that we observed during our fieldwork.  The first was that between the values, norms, and ideas portrayed on television shows, especially telenovelas, that were targeted for an audience of upper and middle-class Brazilians living in the main metropolitan cities, and those of the communities which we studied, many which considered themselves to be far less “modern” or more conservative than people living in cities such as Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo.  The other was the intergenerational conflict or friction between youth and their parents.  The question we address here is whether the low levels of fertility prevailing in Brazil for the last five years, a TFR of 1.8, was foretold in the interviews and focus groups we conducted a decade earlier, some of which included young women who would be of prime childbearing age a decade later.