Incentives and reinforcement: a behavioral approach to fertility.

As behavior modification has been successfully used to treat a variety of problems, it is possible that the experimental analysis of reproductive behavior will lead to scientific understanding and thus to effective and acceptable means of control. In order to be useful the applied behavior analysis must search for environmental variables that can be manipulated directly, rather than for cognitive constructs, personality dispositions, beliefs, attitudes, values, or other variables which are themselves inferences from behavior. Attention should be focused on variables such as the frequency and timing of coitus and the access to, purchase of, and use of birth control devices and services. The implications of reinforcement theory for the problem of excessive fertility fall into 2 main classes -- those that relate to the construction of social policy and those that have to do with individual adherences to social policy. Initially, a programmatic description of research consistent with behavior modification should concentrate on increasing the probability of contraceptive behavior among individuals for whom pregnancy is already undesirable. The more difficult problem of instituting formal incentive schemes to change the reinforcement value of pregnancy for those who want large families should probably be postponed until demonstrated success is available on the problem of eliminating unwanted pregnancies. An ideal experiment would be 1 in which demographically equivalent experimental and control communities (rural and urban) were examined in the context of a multiple-baseline paradigm.