Keywords
fertility
motherhood
precarity
Chile autonomía
fertilidad
maternidad
precariedad
Chile
How to Cite
Abstract
The postponement of the transition to motherhood is one of the most important transformations of reproduction in Chile, however, there are few empirical studies addressing late fertility. Through the analysis of the Birth Databases (1980-2018) from the National Statistics Institute and 24 in-depth semistructured interviews (2016-2017), this article characterizes the demographic trends and subjective experiences of the postponement of motherhood in Chilean society. The findings demonstrate that the increase of the average age of transition to motherhood is a consistent demographic trend in the last 40 years that has intensified increasing from 23,1 to 26,1 years in the last decade. Although this trend has been largely interpreted as a consequence of cultural transformations associated to greater female autonomy, the findings suggest that, in a context characterized by the precarization of the social conditions for having and raising children, the postponement of motherhood emerges as a reproductive tactic that provides biographical solutions to systemic contradictions.
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