 |
“Every child is a gift of Our Good Lord,” a Catholic mother of thirteen remembers being told in the nineteen fifties. She responded: “Well, I would like Him to give His gifts to the neighbors!” During the twentieth century in Europe as well as in the USA, Catholics were relatively slow in adopting family planning. How did the specific Catholic reproductive behavior come about? This book aims at disclosing the mechanism behind the influence of religion on Catholic fertility behavior in the Netherlands between 1870 and 1970. Schoonheim studies the relationship between faith and fertility on different levels of Dutch society. She explains the way religion, from the late nineteenth century onwards, came to constitute a nationwide social structure. Research on six Catholic municipalities points out how socio-economic and cultural circumstances stimulated or discouraged the introduction of family planning. On an individual level, letters by Catholic women show the different ways in which believers were confronted with doctrines that affected reproduction. Only in the nineteen sixties did the relationship between Catholic religion and reproduction change dramatically on each of these levels. In less than a decade, fertility rates in Catholic regions tumbled to become the lowest of the Netherlands.
Jaar van uitgave: 2005
ISBN: 90-5260-186-0
Aantal pagina’s: 280
Prijs: € 29,90
|
