Population Research and Policy Review最新文献

There is a large body of research examining women's fertility decision-making. Yet this work rarely considers how women's experiences with reproductive health conditions may be linked to their fertility goals, a problematic oversight given the growing emphases on reproductive careers and childbearing biographies that highlight the need to take a life course approach to fertility. Using the 2015-2019 National Survey of Family Growth (N = 8867), this paper examines how reproductive health conditions are associated with women's fertility goals among women who are not surgically sterile or meet the medical definition of infertility. Slightly more than one in five women report at least one reproductive health condition. Multivariable logistic regressions show that women who report a diagnosis of any reproductive health condition are 34% more likely to desire a child than their peers with no such diagnoses. However, conditional on desiring a child, women with such diagnoses are 35% less likely to intend to have a child. These findings suggest that reproductive health conditions might be perceived as barriers to fulfilling fertility goals.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11113-026-09996-0.

The official poverty measure of the United States remains unequipped to appropriately capture poverty across America. As a result, the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) has increasingly supplanted the official measure in policy analysis and statistics. A primary point of conflict among poverty-focused scholars regarding the SPM is its current geographic adjustment, which adjusts poverty thresholds at three spatial scales: identified metropolitan areas, unidentified metropolitan areas by state, and nonmetropolitan areas by state. Pooling all nonmetropolitan counties within each state into a single adjustment is believed to be responsible for the 'flip' in the rural-urban poverty differential between the official measure and the SPM. Using federally restricted data, we address this conflict and generate novel estimates of the SPM using county-specific, hybrid, and commuting-zone geographic adjustments. Our estimates illustrate the role of the current adjustment in our understanding of rural-urban poverty, while also demonstrating the utility of our preferred commuting-zone-level adjustment.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11113-026-09995-1.

Since 2006, Mexico has experienced a surge in homicides due to national policies and international influences on drug trafficking activities. Although the effects of the so-called "Drug War" have been extensively studied in demography and social science research, whether and how the increase in homicides has affected fertility is poorly understood. This study provides a comprehensive account of the association between homicides and changes in fertility rates and desires in Mexico. Using population-level administrative data on births, deaths, and homicides for 2443 municipalities, we apply fixed-effects models and a staggered difference-in-differences estimator to study the effect of homicidal violence on total fertility rate (TFR), crude birth rate (CBR), and birth counts across Mexican municipalities between 2000 and 2020. Then, using random-intercept and fixed-effects models, we analyze the association between changes in homicide rates and fertility desires for 6341 women from the Mexican Family Life Survey (2002-2012). Our findings show very small negative associations, and no overall effect of homicides on fertility for the period considered. Similarly, we find no association between municipality-level homicide rates and fertility desires, consistently by education, age, and parity. Our results show remarkable continuity in the Mexican fertility decline despite the rapid escalation of violence.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11113-026-09999-x.

The literature on the micro-level gendered associations between employment and fertility in couples has presented a mixed picture, contrasting a uniformly positive association of employment and first birth for men with negative, zero, or positive associations for women. Differences in period, country context, and women's educational level have been proposed as explanations for the ambiguous findings. We attempted to resolve these differences and explanations by estimating the employment associations for co-residential different-sex couples' first birth in 24 European countries using the 2004-2017 waves of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) panel survey. We paid particular attention to the stability of women's pre-conception employment. We found that having both the woman and man full-time, full-year employed was associated with a higher first-birth risk relative to only the man full-time, full-year employed ("male-breadwinner") and relative to neither the woman nor the man full-time, full-year employed. Women's full-time, full-year employment across two pre-conception years was strongly positively associated with the risk of first birth for women's low-, medium-, and high-educational-attainment groups. The association of women's full-time, full-year employment with first birth was positive not only overall, but also separately for Western-, Eastern-, and Southern-European country groups. These findings suggest that women's stable full-time employment may be a general precondition for initiating parenthood among European couples.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at10.1007/s11113-026-09990-6.

Poverty is particularly concerning during early childhood and the early school years, as it can negatively impact child development both in the short and long term. To alleviate economic hardship, the U.S. government provides a patchwork of income support policies. This paper examines two of the largest programs, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which low-income working families often receive simultaneously. This paper is the first to explore whether these benefits interact to influence children's early cognitive development in families receiving both programs. To address endogeneity of program benefits, I use a two-way (child and year) fixed effects model to leverage the variation in the maximum federal and state EITC benefits stemming from changes in the number of children and state EITC policies, as well as the variation in SNAP purchasing power driven by local food prices over time within each child, rather than actual benefit amounts. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (which tracks a nationally representative 2001 birth cohort through the kindergarten-entry period), I find new population-level evidence that EITC benefits are effective at improving early math and reading skills when coupled with greater SNAP purchasing power, and vice versa (sample size = 1300). Suggestive evidence is provided on the mechanisms underlying such complementary effects on early cognitive outcomes. The findings highlight the importance of enhancing the reach and generosity of both programs.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11113-025-09985-9.

Understanding trends in fertility goals (attitudes, desires, intentions, etc.), as well as variation by age and parity, is important for understanding current U.S. fertility and assessing likely future outcomes. Both men's and women's childbearing goals shape fertility behavior. However, most research on fertility goals focuses on women, and little is known about how men's fertility goals may have changed over time or vary by age and parity. In this paper, we draw from the U.S. National Survey of Family Growth 2011-2019 to estimate trends in age- and parity-specific indicators for both men and women of (i) the proportion of positive prospective fertility intentions, (ii) the timing of prospective fertility intentions, and (iii) the retrospective reporting of fertility desires. Results show important differences and similarities in men's and women's fertility goals, as well as a mixed picture regarding gender convergence or divergence in fertility goals, depending on the exact outcome analyzed. Men are more likely to intend a(nother) child and have greater intentions to delay childbearing, both at the aggregate and across age and parity. Prospective intentions declined for both men and women, but at a higher rate for women, and the declines were proportionally larger early in the life course. For both men and women, we find increases in intended childlessness and intentions to delay childbearing. These two processes together point to potential future declines in cohort fertility, both through unrealized fertility and voluntary childlessness. We conclude by discussing the benefits and challenges of including men in fertility research.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11113-025-09989-5.

Women returning to their natal homes for pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum is common and understudied in South Asia, with important implications for maternal and newborn health policies, as well as data quality and interpretation. Using data from 1252 women residing in a Health and Demographic Surveillance Site in Maharashtra, India we explore timing, duration and associated socio-economic factors with Temporary Childbirth Migration (TCM). Our overall goal is to develop a definition of temporary childbirth migration and situate it within demographic migration theory. Most (80%) of women migrated for over 1 month in the last trimester of pregnancy, with a sizeable proportion (22%) departing immediately after delivery. Socio-demographic factors were not associated with migrating during pregnancy; migrating postpartum was associated with younger age and higher education. Based on these findings, we propose a definition of Temporary childbirth Migration as a form of migration from husbands to natal homes and back, for at least one month duration, with departure and return at any time in the perinatal period. Given the potentially large number of women moving location for an extended duration in every pregnancy (in a country of over 1.4 billion), programs providing services to pregnant women and newborns should take this phenomenon into consideration. Additionally, data collection efforts at the clinical and household level should understand that women's place of delivery or receipt of prenatal or postnatal services may differ from her normal place of residence.

Limited data are available on the characteristics and outcomes both of people who have and who have not had an abortion. Administrative data sources contain information on aggregate abortion counts and some demographic characteristics describing individuals who had an abortion but not on those who did not have an abortion. They are therefore of limited use for analyzing the characteristics, reproductive behaviors, and attitudes associated with abortion risk. Direct questions in population representative surveys yield downwardly biased estimates of abortion and likely differential underreporting of abortion by socio-demographic characteristics. In the present study, we evaluate the effectiveness of an indirect survey method, the list experiment, for improving estimates of abortion risk and differentials in population-representative surveys. We estimate cumulative-lifetime abortion incidence in 2017 and five-year incidence in 2021 using two cross-sectional surveys administered in Delaware and Maryland and evaluate the five-year estimates against external benchmarks from administrative data. We use multivariate regression with the list-experiment data to examine abortion incidence by socio-demographic predictors. We find that list-experiment estimates of five-year abortion incidence are similar to estimates calculated from external data: that cumulative lifetime abortion incidence increases monotonically with age, and that five-year incidence is inverse U-shaped. Black adults are found to be much more likely to have had an abortion both in the past five-years and over the reproductive lifetime, before and after controlling for age, parity, relationship status, education, and household income. We conclude positively about the validity and utility of the list experiment method.

Higher levels of both individual education and community education may facilitate improved sexual and reproductive health knowledge, but our understanding of this relationship in sub-Saharan Africa remains limited. Drawing on human capital and social learning theories, and Demographic Health Survey data from Uganda, we examine the independent and interactive associations between individual and community education and two outcomes-HIV prevention knowledge and knowledge of different contraceptive methods-including differences by gender. Consistent with human capital and social learning theories, results from multilevel regression models show that both individual education and community education levels are independently and positively associated with more accurate sexual and reproductive health knowledge. Further, in support of the idea that human capital and social learning theories work in tandem, we find that the association between individual education and HIV knowledge is stronger in less educated communities, and grows weaker as community education increases, for both men and women. Similarly, for men, but not women, the association between individual education and contraceptive knowledge is stronger in less educated communities and weaker as community education increases. Among women, individual education was strongly and positively associated with contraceptive knowledge, an association that varied little across more or less educated communities. Our findings suggest that policy makers should consider community education levels when developing priorities for sexual and reproductive health knowledge interventions.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11113-025-09958-y.

Despite low U.S. fertility rates since the Great Recession, two-child norms remain pervasive, suggesting individuals are unable to achieve their goals. To understand what may be driving the apparent mismatch between goals and behavior, we focus on pregnancy avoidance, as individuals may be deciding against births in the short term rather than deciding not to have any, or any more, children. Further, we incorporate subjective evaluations of the future related to economic and relational factors as well as objective socioeconomic indicators, drawing from the Narratives of the Future framework and Easterlin's theory about expected standard of living. We use data from the 2018-2020 wave of the Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study (N = 880), a population-based dataset, to examine short-term pregnancy avoidance among adults aged 29-36. We find that higher levels of personal economic pessimism and concerns about having a good relationship in the future are associated with greater importance of avoiding a pregnancy in the short term, even when controlling for objective characteristics such as economic hardship, relationship status, and other sociodemographic covariates. The results highlight the need to incorporate both subjective and objective statuses in research on fertility decision-making, and the implications of these findings point to short-term pregnancy avoidance and fertility postponement as a potential mechanism underlying contemporary low birth rates in the U.S.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11113-025-09962-2.