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Title: How Late Do Women Wait? Expectations of Parenthood and Childlessness across the Reproductive Life Course
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Martin, Steven P.
How Late Do Women Wait? Expectations of Parenthood and Childlessness across the Reproductive Life Course
Presented: San Francisco CA, Population Association of America Meetings, May 2012
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Population Association of America
Keyword(s): Childbearing; Fertility; Life Course; Parenthood

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

We use longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979–2008 to measure women’s fertility expectations across the reproductive life course. We also develop models of what the trajectories of fertility expectations for childless women should look like, if childlessness is the result of delaying childbearing based on “good” and “bad” information, respectively, about age and infertility. Our main methodological advance is to develop indirect techniques to distinguish women who “try” for a child at a given age (or are sexually active with imperfect enough contraceptive use that a birth would be expected) from women who switch to expecting childlessness without ever having actively attempted to get pregnant. We find that prolonged expectation of parenthood among ultimately childless women is the exception rather than the rule; most childless women shift their fertility expectations to expectations of childlessness by their early thirties, even if they never try for a baby.
Bibliography Citation
Martin, Steven P. "How Late Do Women Wait? Expectations of Parenthood and Childlessness across the Reproductive Life Course." Presented: San Francisco CA, Population Association of America Meetings, May 2012.