Summary Of TV As Birth Control By Fred Pearce

In Fred Pearce’s essay, “TV as Birth Control”, he argues that the installation of television sets in developing countries has a severe effect to the fertility rate of those countries. Pearce makes a valid argument stating that women are having less children just by simply watching a television program, such as a soap opera. Pearce provides examples of several countries that have fewer educational opportunities than the Unites States does, and he specifically uses those examples to show the readers why watching television is helpful to that problem. The author makes a compelling testimony and is greatly persuasive with the use of statistics as well as the evidence from researchers.
Pearce uses an example of the population of India, which happens to be the second most populated country in the entire world. “Within a generation, Indian women have halved the number of children they bear, …show more content…
Indian women are well-known for having large families, because that’s what their culture has always imposed on them. Young Indian girls are raised to believe that having many children starting at a relatively young age was the way of life. In current times, though, these young women are becoming more and more educated with how other countries do things differently. Pearce provided insight from two economic researchers, Robert Jensen and Emily Oster. In their recent studies, it has been found that the installation of television sets in countries with lower-income households has had “the impact of an extra five years of female education” (215). Television is constantly increasing in popularity, and has had a higher demand in different countries for different reasons. United States families want to install sets into their homes because TV is quality entertainment. Indian families feel as if it is a luxury to be able to have a television in their home. People in the United States are fortunate to have a wide-range