The Subsequent Fertility of U.S. Mothers of Children with Serious Conditions

• In Event: Sociology of Population Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4. Fertility Dynamics

Abstract

The increasing prevalence of disabilities in childhood has implications for fertility rates, as the challenges of raising children with serious physical, intellectual, mental, or behavioral conditions could discourage families from having future children. Although past studies focusing on live births have supported this possibility, this study offered a new twist by disentangling fertility into pregnancy occurrence, pregnancy progression, and live birth. Logit and discrete-time logit regression of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) revealed that a higher proportion of children with serious conditions lowered mothers’ hazard of live births but did not reduce hazard of subsequent pregnancies. Instead, mothers of children with disabilities were significantly less likely to carry pregnancies to live birth, especially when the existing child’s condition was prenatally detectable. These patterns suggest that fertility suppression associated with having children with serious conditions arose not from parents deliberately forgoing or delaying childbearing but from a post-conception “filtering” process marked by higher rates of non-live birth outcomes. Additional analyses indicated that mothers without a college degree were especially likely to experience a disruption between pregnancy and birth after having children with serious conditions, while college-educated mothers were more likely to transition from pregnancy to birth.

Authors

• Iani Sam, University of Texas at Austin

• Robert Crosnoe, University of Texas-Austin