FERTILITY PREFERENCES AND CONTRACEPTIVE PRACTICE IN NIGERIA

Fertility preferences reported by currently married women are analyzed with respect to their characteristics and contraceptive use. Only 36 percent of the women gave numerical responses to the question on desired family size, while 63 percent gave ‘up to God’ responses. Nigerian women still have a preference for a large family size (6 children), which may be considered moderate relative to family size of 7 to 10 children reported in earlier studies. Only 18 percent of currently married women desired to cease childbearing, a low figure indeed, but much higher that the 5 percent recorded a decade ago by a comparable national survey. The study reveals a^ high level of consistency between desire for children and whether or not desired family size exceeds the number of living children, and shows that fertility preference reasonably predicts contraceptive use. Desire to cease childbearing is as closely related to contraceptive use as most of other variables considered. There is therefore the need to improve contraceptive accessibility and knowledge of fertility control possibilities for the general public, which are among the objectives of Nigeria’s population policy.