Women’s Reproductive Health in Yemen By T.S. Sunil and Vijayan P ...

the amount of support that parents get from children begins to decline. Thus, the wealth flow reverses, and parents begin to spend their income on children rather than deriving income from them. In this situation, parents are forced to opt for fewer children because of the economic cost of having more children. This leads to either high or low use of contraceptives in the society. It is true that, with social and economic development, more and more people will join the ranks of the middle class and therefore will find having a large family a burden given the reverses in wealth flow. That means the demand for children will go down. With this change in demand for children, contraceptive use is likely to go up. Thus, Caldwell's theory can be used to argue that, given that modernization extends globally, socioeconomic development is more likely to increase contraceptive use. Of course, this assumes access to free or inexpensive contraception. The basic premise of Caldwell's argument is that when the net wealth transfer from children to parents is positive, parents are more likely to have more children because ultimately their income will be increased by having many children. On the other hand, if the children consume more parental wealth than what parents will receive at the end, then parents are more likely to decide to have fewer children. He further argued that, prior to modernization, children were considered an asset. However, because of modernization the cost of rearing children has increased. Several scholars have used this framework to explain fertility changes (Handwerker, 1986; Turke, 1989) and have criticized it on other grounds (see, e.g., Thornton & Fricke, 1987).

In his multiphasic response theory, Davis (1963) argued that deliberate use of contraception by married couples is one of many ways of making demographic change. He argued that, because of economic strain in the household, individuals are forced to