DONDENA Seminar - Leticia Marteleto

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“The DZC Study: Who Can Have a Baby? Social Norms and the Right to Reproduce” 

SPEAKER: Letícia Marteleto (University of Pennsylvania)

ABSTRACT: In this talk, Professor Marteleto will introduce the DZC study and its main contributions to the literature. She will then focus on childbearing norms and how the current discourse on childbearing norms influences social interactions, policy priorities, and medical practices, reflecting and reinforcing social stratification. She will introduce a theoretical framework that systematically explains stratification and discrimination within childbearing norms. The theory of socially sanctioned reproduction (TSSR) emphasizes how reproductive norms are shaped by individual and intersectional attributes of both evaluators and those evaluated. She will also present an empirical application of the model using paired conjoint survey experiments with a population-based sample of women ages 18 to 34 in Pernambuco, Brazil—a highly unequal, multiracial context. Data comes from the NICHD-funded DZC project, the first population-based panel of women of reproductive age in Brazil. Findings show how intersectional attributes and in-group/out-group dynamics, principally along race and SES lines, define childbearing norms. Black women receive less approval if in low- versus high-SES positions, whereas White women receive similar levels of approval regardless of SES. Further findings indicate that these discriminatory patterns are shaped by the social attributes of evaluators themselves, suggesting processes of othering and group attachment. Marteleto will discuss how the theoretical and empirical frameworks can be extended to study norms in other highly contested areas of reproductive and family life and in other highly unequal contexts.

BIO: Letícia Marteleto is a sociologist and social demographer. She is currently Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, a research affiliate of the Population Studies Center, and Chair of the Graduate Group in Demography (GGD). Her research is motivated by the central question of how social disadvantages and reproductive processes intertwine across generations and over the life course. She has studied educational and health stratification, intergenerational mobility, and the effect of family and structural shocks on reproductive processes when social and demographic norms are in flux, such as during epidemics and extreme weather events. She is the Principal Investigator of NICHD-funded DZC (Longitudinal Study of the Demographic Consequences of Zika & Covid-19), a study funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) that has been collecting population-based data for the last eight years. This research has provided important insights into how public health crises profoundly change women’s reproductive preferences and behaviors, as well as the structural inequality shaping these processes.