A Few Critical Remarks on the Culturalist Theories on Fertility with Special View on Romania’s Situation
A Few Critical Remarks on the Culturalist Theories on Fertility with Special View on Romania’s Situation

Summary/Abstract: This article elaborates on the ideas presented at a scientific reunion1 held in Cluj-Napoca in September 2008. Its major aim is to dismiss the attempt to attribute the decrease of fertility below the replacement level to cultural factors, particularly to the value system change that governs various behaviour patterns, the reproductive included. This cultural determinism, most clearly stated in the theory of the so-called “second demographic transition,” is a most convenient explanatory attempt, which has the great (dis)advantage that, by the very nature of the factors mentioned, cannot be submitted to a decisive test. We will bring logical and factual counter-arguments that we expect to accumulate in time, so that this theory (fashionable at present) will come to occupy its due place among the numerous constructs that account for human fertile behaviour. Factual arguments have been derived from recent demographic developments in Romania, a country different in several cultural and structural aspects from the “hard nucleus” of modern and postmodern Western civilisation but which, nevertheless, has experienced sub fertile behaviour.

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