The shifting politics and practices of reproduction in the Caribbean that began in the 1930s and accelerated in the 1960s took off in the 1970s and 1980s, attracting the attention of both local and international commentators. While conducting research in a small town in Trinidad in the 1980s, for example, anthropologist Joseph Nevadomsky highlighted the way villagers would openly discuss birth control in mixed company, relating experiences and sharing complaints about side effects and preferences. As one man reported to him,

Sociologists also noted the high rates of birth control literacy in several Caribbean countries; a 1986 study, for example, showed that some 75 percent of Barbadian women were able to name six or more types of contraceptives. This increased birth control literacy also seems to have corresponded with an increase in birth control practice. Indeed, over the course of the 1960s–1980s, Caribbean countries experienced rapid declines in their birthrates, and by 1990, the Anglophone Caribbean as a whole was recognized as having had some of the most dramatic declines in total fertility in the world. As Patricia Mohammed argues, by the thirtieth anniversary of the Family Planning Association of Trinidad and Tobago in 1986, birth control had moved fairly concretely from something “not mentioned in polite circles and unheard of in others” to “an accepted institution.”

Family planning campaigns and state programs cannot claim sole responsibility for these shifts. On some islands, such as Trinidad, birth-rates began to decline before the expansion of state clinics, suggesting that some of those motivated to limit their families were able to find ways to do so without the support of the state.