Steamy soap operas crashes Brazil’s fertility rate and fuel its vibrant economy

The largest Latin American country with 191-million population, Brazil dominated by Roman Catholic Church, where abortion is illegal, and no official government policy has ever promoted birth control,  the family size has sharply dropped in the last five decades. Their demographic phenomenon, the fertility rate of 2.36 children per family has crashed to the national average of 1.9, lower than United States.

It is not just wealthy and professional women who have stopped bearing multiple children in Brazil, but the women from the countryside favelas in Belo Horizonte, also opted for having only one baby per family by saying  “ A fabrica esta Fechada” The factory is closed. What took 120 years in England took only 40 years.

There a quite a few women under 35 who have already had sterilization surgery in Brazil and they seem to have no scruples about discussing it. Brazil has no formula for crashing a developing nation’s fertility rate without official intervention from the government – no Chinese-style one-child policy, no Indian- style effort to force sterilization upon the populace. Brazil’s military rulers of the past who seized the power in a 1964 military coup and held on two decades forced the country to a new kind of economy, on that has concentrated work in the cities where housing is expensive and cramped, the favela street are lethal, babies look more like an unwanted new expense and the farmhands had to work hard and their women must take jobs for their families’ survival which required leaving home for over 10 hours a day.

The TV soap operas or telenovelas  broadcast in Portuguese-language, all over Latin America and Europe, displaying singular, vivid images of the Brazilian modern family fair skinned, affluent. By the 1980s and 90s all of Brazil was dominated by the Globo network, who popular prime-time novelas were often a central topic of conversation in era of multichannel satellite broadcasting. When asked about “if the Globo network is trying to introduce family planning on purpose, the response was “ it’s much easier to write novelas about small families”.