Fewer babies in India. What will grandma think?

My paternal grandmother got married when she was nine.

Of course, this was a long time ago--back in 1922.  Grandmother had funny anecdotes on how children, who didn't quite understand what was going on, would sometimes throw temper tantrums like how kids typically do. Or, even funnier--fall asleep even as the wedding ceremony rituals were being carried out.

It is simply bizarre that such child marriages were the norm at one time, though it makes sense on one level--when we project this against the time frame of life expectancy then, which was about 35 years.  If we were to use that same ratio, then it might be comparable to a 20-year old getting married in contemporary times.

Grandmother did live past that 35 years of life expectancy at birth, but the husband she was married to did not.  She was 18 when she became a widow.

A lot happened even in those nine years between the marriage at nine and widowhood at 18.

After the wedding, she continued to live with her parents until she became a woman--the much talked about 'aunt flo' in our times.  During those years, her husband would come over for important occasions.  Craziness!  Parents now rush around organizing parties and playdates for kids that age, and kids might even play house--whereas back then it was kids being husband and wife for real!

Soon after that biological metamorphosis, grandmother went to live with her in-laws and was a little older than 15 when she had her first child.  15 and a half, and she was a mother. And she was nearing her 18 when her second son was born, and slightly over a month later grandfather died, and she lived almost 50 years after that as a widow.  

Life has changed a lot since then. Thankfully!

Child marriages are now illegal, though they do happen sometimes, particularly in states far away from the progressive-thinking southern part of India where my grandparents lived and died.  Now, women have considerably more rights, though there is a lot more to go to achieve equality between the genders.  One of the biggest impacts has been in the rapidly decreasing fertility rates in India, without the draconian Chinese approach to population control.  Continuing the tremendous decline in birth rates, India has been trying quite a few approaches, including "Cash Bonuses to Slow Birthrates":

“I want to tell you about our honeymoon package,” began Ms. Jadhav, an auxiliary nurse, during a recent house call on a new bride in this farming region in the state of Maharashtra. Ms. Jadhav explained that the district government would pay 5,000 rupees, or about $106, if the couple waited to have children. ...
The program here in Satara is a pilot program — one of several initiatives across the country that have used a softer approach — trying to slow down population growth by challenging deeply ingrained rural customs. Experts say far too many rural women wed as teenagers, usually in arranged marriages, and then have babies in quick succession — a pattern that exacerbates poverty and spurs what demographers call “population momentum” by bunching children together. In Satara, local health officials have led campaigns to curb teenage weddings, as well as promoting the “honeymoon package” of cash bonuses and encouraging the use of contraceptives so that couples wait to start a family.

I am confident that grandmother would be very happy with these approaches.  She was delighted to see my sister breeze through school, and was visibly proud of the granddaughter getting a college degree--not just the undergraduate, but a master's degree as well.