Are Two Really Enough? The Discrepancy Between Desired and Actual Fertility in Nepal.

In Nepal, there is a discrepancy between actual fertility and fertility preference. While the mean actual fertility, as measured by total number of children ever born is 3.3, the mean desired fertility is only 2.6. Following this observation, our main research question in the paper is to examine why such a discrepancy between actual fertility and desired fertility exists among married Nepali women. There are three main explanations given in the paper to explore this discrepancy. The first is preference for sons. We hypothesize that due to son preference in Nepal, women are giving birth to more children than they desire in order to ensure that they have a son. Second, we hypothesize that family planning media messages influence responses given by informants as they are merely giving out the socially desirable number of children as they hear through family planning campaigns. Third, we hypothesize that due to the large unmet need of family planning, women in Nepal are not able to limit their fertility as desired. In this paper we use the 2001 Nepal Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS). We examine the influence of son preference, family planning media, and unmet need for contraception on the discrepancy between total number of children ever born and the desired number of children. We also control for age, education, region of residence, and socioeconomic status as well as other proximate determinants such as age at first marriage and fecundity status. We employ structural equation modeling in this analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]