Available data indicate that fertility rates in Brazil remained fairly constant through the first half of this century. In the late 1960s, the birth rate then began a sudden and rapid decline. The pace of the transition from high to lower fertility was arguably the most significant demographic event in the country's recent history. The change was all the more remarkable because of the pattern of the fertility change by socioeconomic strata. The common expectation is for the onset of lower fertility to begin among the urban middle class, gradually spreading downward through the social ranks and outward to the countryside. Recent estimates for Brazil, in contrast, show a sharp and simultaneous drop in the birth rate among all social groups, both urban and rural.

In keeping with the perspective adopted in previous chapters, we reject the assumption that social change had equal consequences for all socioeconomic groups. Instead, our objective is to examine the manner in which recent transformations in Brazilian social and economic structure unequally affected different subclasses of the population, stimulating a reduced demand for children. If fertility fell in all socioeconomic strata, the point we wish to make is that this common outcome was caused by factors that were more or less specific to different sectors of the population. Comparing rural and urban areas, and middle and lower income groups, we find different macrostructural processes working to alter reproductive behavior in favor of a smaller family size.