Migrating to New Contraceptive Contexts: The Case of Migrants from Turkey to France

Do migrants adopt the contraceptive norms dominant in their destination context? To explore this question, we adopt a multi-sited analysis where we standardize and integrate data on women's contraceptive use from two different sources- Trajectoires et Origines (TeO) survey collected in France (the receiving country)-and the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) collected in Turkey (the sending country). Descriptive analyses indicate that contraceptive use of migrant women from Turkey in France is more comparable to that of non-migrant women in France compared to non-migrant women in Turkey. To address migrant selectivity on observed characteristics in multivariate analyses, non-migrant groups in France and Turkey are re-weighted with entropy balancing to resemble migrants on observed characteristics. Multivariate results indicate that there are sizeable differences in contraceptive usage between Turkish migrants and non-migrant Turkish women, which undermines the hypothesis of selection on observables. Yet, there are no significant differences between migrants and non-migrant French women in contraceptive methods, thus supporting an adaptation perspective. Supplementary analyses highlight several pathways that could help explain these findings.