Fertility measurement : a report.

  • United States. National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics.
Date:
1965
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Fertility measurement : a report. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    19/36 (page 11)
    the tabulations the single women are assumed to be childless.) There is also some underreporting by women ever married, Data on retrospective birth rates for distant dates (such as the period 1930 to 1934), obtained from fertility histories in 1959, show annual birth rates that run about 5 percent below those from contemporary vital statistics for white women and about 8 percent for nonwhite women, The census data include illegitimate births to the extent that such are reported by women who have married, but the vital statistics have more complete coverage of illegitimate births. Fertility histories obtained in 1959 provide direct evidence that recent marriage cohorts had more births earlier after marriage than some earlier cohorts. Figure 2 illustrates the rise in first birth rates at short intervals after marriage. The same survey (1959) shows that among white births in the period 1955 to 1959 the median spacing since first marriage of the mother was 16.2 months for first births, 49.0 months for second births, 82.7 months for third births, and 108.4 months for fourth births. The medians cited represent reductions of 4 to 6 months over the corresponding medians for white births in the period 1935 to 1939. The survey shows that roughly 90 percent of first births occur by 5 years after the first marriage of the mother. Roughly 80 per- cent of births of second and higher order occur in the period 1 to 4 years after the birth of a previous child. The very high concentration of events within a narrow spacing range indicates that information on the number of women by inter- val since the latest birth would be of considerable value for improving short-run projections of births. Increases after 1940 in the fertility of women in various subgroups of the population have generally more than offset the effect of certain trends that might otherwise have caused some decline. For example, a trend toward increased urbanization of the population tended to cause some decline because urban fertility has been much lower than rural fertility, but this has been off- set by a relatively larger rise in urban fertility than in rural fertility with the result that urban- rural differences in fertility have narrowed since 1940, Another example is the trend toward in- creased educational attainment of the population and the tendency for the better-educated groups 100 90 Women first married in 1955-59 80 70 60 50 s— Women first married in 1950-54 40 30 FIRST BIRTHS PER 1000 CHILDLESS WOMEN 20 10 }/ Women first married in 1930-34—~ af Sa a ES 0 TO!» ike 24 36 48 60 72 84 MONTHS SINCE FIRST MARRIAGE SOURCE. Emerging Techniques in Population Research, 1963. Mi/bonk Memoria/ Fund, p.99. Figure 2. First births in successive months since first marriage per 1,000 women childless at be- ginning of the month, for specified TENSES: co- horts of white women. to have fewer children than the less-educated; this has been offset by a relatively larger rise in fertility among women at higher education levels. Comparisons of 1940 and 1950 census data indi- cate that shortly after World War II the population groups which previously had the lowest fertility had the most increase with the result that fer- tility differentials by social and economic status narrowed somewhat. Data from the 1960 census indicate, in general, a continuation of the trend although the relative increases in fertility were similar for many social and economic groups between 1950 and 1960. Except at very young childbearing ages the fertility of the nonwhite population increased more than that of the white population between 1950 and 1960. Census data on women by number of own children under 5 years of age in 1950 and 1960 indicate that changes in the numbers of women at each age were such that there would have been a