Delayed Fertility and Childlessness

Abstract

As family formation is delayed to older ages in a growing number of countries, the window of opportunity to have children is narrowing for an increasing number of people. This leads us to ask whether delayed first birth is associated with an increasing number of people remaining childless at the end of their reproductive lives in countries at the most advanced stage of delayed fertility. To explore this question, we adopt a life-table approach using aggregate cohort data from the Human Fertility Database for selected countries in Europe, North America, and Asia to monitor the proportions of women who are still childless at a given age across subsequent birth cohorts, as well as the probabilities of having a first child later conditional on postponement up to that age. In the earlier cohorts, the majority of women entered parenthood at an early age, leaving a limited and select group of women childless in their early 30s. With the postponement of motherhood in later birth cohorts, however, the group of women childless in their late 20s and early 30s increased and thus became less selective, initially leading to an increase in the conditional probability of first birth among women childless in their early 30s. In the most recent cohorts for which complete birth histories are available, the proportion of women childless around age 35 has continued to increase, but in countries with decidedly late first birth schedules the progression ratios to first birth at age 35 and older—conditional on postponement up to that age—have stopped increasing in these cohorts. They appear to have plateaued in several countries, with progression ratios to first birth of no more than 45% conditional on postponement to age 35 and 13% conditional on postponement to age 40. The finding that progressions to first birth above age 35 have recently plateaued in countries with late fertility schedules—combined with the finding that they are consistently lower at these older ages than among childless women who postponed to age before 30—suggests that permanent childlessness is likely to increase as first birth schedules are increasingly shifted into these older age groups.