A Phenomenological Study on Married Women Awareness of Childbearing

Introduction One of the fundamental questions of demographers and sociologists is why the fertility rate has decreased during the recent ages. Social scientists consider different factors to explain fertility behavior changes in the 20th and 21st centuries. Here, the main question is what changes have been occurred in the awareness of the modern individual and how she sees childbearing. Iran is also one of the countries which have seen a remarkable decline in fertility rate over the last 50 years. This research investigates the awareness of married women about childbearing. Material & Methods The research has been performed by the phenomenological method. Childbearing experiences and awareness of 11 married women have been studied in this research. In effect, every Phenomenological study includes in-depth explanations and accurate analysis of lived experience. The current study has been performed by Mostakas method. In the first stage, the problem of research is developed and then the philosophical and phenomenological assumptions are collected. Also, purposive and also accessible samplings have been applied in this study. The researcher has studied the experience and consciousness of 11 married women aged 15-40. In the third stage, the investigator collected the research information using the deep interview method. In the last stage, the researcher has analyzed the data and extracted meaningful and important propositions or semantic units, clusters, and themes from the phrases. Discussion of Results & Conclusions According to the current research findings, childbearing social phenomenon includes central themes such as childbearing meaning, children's ideal number, children's rational number, children's sexual preference, childbearing reasons, childbearing barriers, excessive rational childbearing barriers, concerns for childbearing, concerns for not having children, the experience of having children, pregnancy experience, pregnancy imagination, following mother's childbearing pattern, the reasons for the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of children's number in source family, and finally, how the mother encourages them to have children. It is worth noting that this social phenomenon is resulted from participants' inter-subjectivity on childbearing. To the research participants, the meaning of childbearing includes sacrificing, developing marital life, meeting emotional needs, and fulfilling the desire of childbearing. The average of children's ideal n