Creation of an agency index for indigenous youth

Alicia Elena Rodríguez Blanco
Maestra en Ciencias Sociales con perspectiva en Estudios de Género

What conditions are most likely to prevent pregnancy among indigenous adolescents and youth? This was the objective for my research project during my PhD in Social Sciences at the Autonomous University of the State of Hidalgo.

There are many studies about this phenomenon due to the problems it generates such as poverty, marginalization, among others. However, my intention was to get to know it from two different perspectives.

The first was to disarm the preconception of teenage pregnancy as a problem in itself, as a stigma, as something that must be eradicated and prevented at all costs. The second was precisely to generate a new look, to see the phenomenon that precedes it and its context.

In order to achieve this new perspective, many hours of reflective exercise were necessary with Germán Vázquez Sandrin, PhD in Latin American Societies Studies with a specialization in Demography from the Sorbonne University in France, who is my thesis director and an expert on the topic of indigenous fertility.

In principle, I observed that talking about fecundity, understood as the birth of the first living child, could support me more than talking about teenage pregnancy. The starting questions were: do all indigenous women become pregnant in adolescence? on what factors does it depend if they do not become pregnant at that stage? what period of life will we consider as adolescence? We determined that we would address indigenous adolescent non-fertility during the period from 15 to 19 years of age.

The next step was to look for an explanation and to describe the capacity of choice with an adjective. We opted for "agency", a category in sociology and specifically that used by Aamrya Sen, Bengali philosopher and economist, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics, who describes the contrast between the patient who waits for things to happen and the agent who is an active promoter of making things happen. In addition to the concept of "freedom of agency" in which he describes the agent choosing actions that lead to greater welfare.

So the defined objective was to find the relationship that exists, if any, between freedom of agency and non-fertility in indigenous women between 15 and 19 years of age.

How can one be sure that a group of women have chosen not to have children in that period of their lives? Therefore, with the help of Germán Vázquez, I embarked on the task of generating an instrument to identify whether or not agency was present in the women in the sample. This led to the creation of the Agency Index for Indigenous Youth, called iaji.

Its construction

For its construction, I first had to identify what would be traditional habits in the life of women in indigenous communities; my look towards them would be disruptive because they went against what most expect at that stage of their lives.

This is how we came up with the table of determinants of agency, which you can consult in this publication. We contrasted the proximate fertility variables proposed by John Bongaarts, Dutch-American demographer and current vice president and distinguished scholar at the Population Council, which are: abortion, family planning, breastfeeding and union, with the explanatory variables of agency in women that Sen had observed: schooling and employment. From this emerged the variables for the iaji agency index.

With this methodological tool, we were able to describe concrete and measurable actions in a sample of indigenous women who had not had their first child in their lifetime, between 15 and 19 years of age.

The variables chosen were: being a breadwinner, leaving the family home as a first aspect of emancipation without the cause being union, starting their sexual life without being united to their partner and choosing to use some contraceptive method; all this during the period of their life specified above.

We assigned a name to each variable and gave an arbitrary value (1 if present and 0 if absent) to each to identify whether or not agency was present.

An example for better understanding is: if iaji equals three or more, freedom of agency is present in the indigenous woman.

For the sample I took the results of the Demographic Retrospective Survey (EDER) 2017 which allowed me to access data from two thousand 151 indigenous women nationwide. Being a restrospective survey I was able to observe whether or not they had had children in the period between the ages of 15 and 19, their background and different aspects of their life after the age of 19.

The results

Of the results obtained, the variable with the highest percentage, 22.4 percent, was that of women who began their sexual life without being in a union during this period of their life. Union refers to cohabiting or cohabiting with a partner.

The second variable with the second highest percentage was family emancipation without union, 12 percent of women left their family home.

The variables with the lowest percentages were breadwinner with 7.3 percent and contraceptive use with 2.7 percent.

These results indicate that agency is manifested in choice about the body and about her status in relation to a partner. It is interesting to note the percentage (7.3%) who did not use contraceptive methods, which would imply that fertility prevention is due to different causes.

I contrasted the findings by applying the Iaji with non-indigenous women. Most notably, the results were proportionally similar between indigenous and non-indigenous women, which, by the way, was not ethnicity.

The results allow us to disabuse the preconception that there is a higher incidence of indigenous teenage pregnancy than in non-indigenous women.

The coinciding factors that prevent fertility in both groups are, on the one hand, the median age of sexual debut in relation to emancipation; in addition, the more years of co-residence, the higher the age of sexual debut. Therefore, an element that prevents fertility in the observed groups is to live more years with the family.

In conclusion, from the development and application of the agency index for indigenous youth, three elements were observed: education is directly related to the prevention of fertility between 15 and 19 years of age; the index with the lowest proportion was the use of contraceptive methods; and the ethnic factor was not a determining factor for the prevention of fertility.