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Filip's avatar

Excellent essay! I like how much you focus on the demand side of contraceptives & transactional sex and what drives it. It reminded me of an older post by Adam Tooze in which he cites a study showing that

"even with higher education 66.7 percent of Nigerian women in 2018 used no contraception. "

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-121-youth-quake-why-african

He argues (or his source material does) that Nigerian women with high education still

"want large families and they are, in their own way, quite successful at matching actual fertility to desired fertility."

Do you know more about this? There is no discussion in his article of differences among religious groups or how many of these women with higher education also actually tend to have a job.

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Kasia Norine Karen's avatar

Damn! Alice. I don’t even know you, but I admire you sm for this! Instead of just saying rapey ass men, lack of female anatomy and autonomy, contraception and choice but a whole lot of pseudo ideological manipulation (I think ideological manipulation are your words) from the male sex and male minded women as being some of the many reasons fertility is still so high in sub- Saharan Africa. You do all this data driven research! I for one appreciate it!

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Kaleberg's avatar

That's a fascinating but horrifying overview. Traditional "Arab" Islam does not come out looking like a force for good. To be fair, traditional everything tends to be a mixed bag at best. The horrible thing is that so much of the world looked just like Africa and not so long ago. Three cheers for modernity.

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Heather's avatar

Why are Europe and North America considered in the same statistical group?

Teenage pregnancy rates, as well as child marriage rates are much higher in North America than in Europe.

This skews the model by grouping these two very different geological areas.

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stephanieb's avatar

Would also

like to know this…

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John Deloran's avatar

Higher in north America than Europe; how does it compare when you split Black and White/ Latin statistics with Europe?

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Federico Soto del Alba's avatar

Compared to what?

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