| Summary: | 碩士 === 南華大學 === 教育社會學研究所 === 97 === For the last two decades, traditional Taiwanese women’s hypergamy is squeezed due to their promotion of educational level and labor participation. As Taiwanese men refuse to marry “upper” women, foreign spouses turn to be their practical choice. As transnational marriage impacts on Taiwanese society, the media constructs many negative images of foreign spouses, such as commercialized marriage, prostitution and low quality of their new-born babies.
Along with increasing foreign spouses, the number of their children moves up as well. Higher proportion of “new Taiwanese children” and their “lower quality” initiate serious worry on how foreign spouses and their children will pull down average quality of Taiwanese population. Unfortunately, these worries have not been supported by sound evidence so far as we understand.
In order to clarify public misunderstanding, this study intends to explore real situation of foreign spouses’ fertility rate and birth quality of their babies. By employing household registration data from Ministry of the Interior, the Survey of Foreign and Mainland Spouse in 2003, and the eighth survey of knowledge, attitude, and practice of family planning and reproductive health in 1998 (KAP VIII), we present the significant difference of marriage-years-specific fertility rates between foreign and Taiwanese women. We also compare birth quality of foreign spouse with that of Taiwanese women including stillbirth, low birth weight, birth defect, prematurely born, and Apgar score by the birth notification data between 2003 and 2007 from Bureau of Health Promotion, Department of Health.
Contrary to public understanding, our study shows that fertility of foreign spouses is actually lower than that of Taiwanese women. Their birth quality is not worse than that of Taiwanese women either in terms of their ration of stillbirth, low birth weight, birth defect, prematurely born, or Apgar score. As a matter of facts, some indicators demonstrate that the qualities of foreign spouses are even better than those of Taiwanese women. As Taiwan faces threat of aging population and ever-lower fertility rates, promotion of foreign spouses’ fertility should be able to delay population aging and improve quality of Taiwanese population. Foreign spouses and their children are actually making a lot of contribution for the whole Taiwanese population.
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