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Trajectories of Unintended Fertility

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Abstract

Having an unintended birth is strongly associated with the likelihood of having later unintended births. We use detailed longitudinal data from the Add Health Study (N = 8300) to investigate whether a host of measured sociodemographic, personality, and psychosocial characteristics select women into this “trajectory” of unintended childbearing. While some measured characteristics and aspects of the unfolding life course are related to unintended childbearing, explicitly modeling these effects does not greatly attenuate the association of an unintended birth with a subsequent one. Next, we statistically control for unmeasured time-invariant covariates that affect all birth intervals, and again find that the association of an unintended birth with subsequent ones remains strong. This persistent, strong association may be the direct result of experiencing an earlier unintended birth. We propose several mechanisms that might explain this strong association.

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Notes

  1. We also considered a related concept, risk-proneness (the propensity to be attracted to risky activities), but it was highly correlated with conscientiousness. Similarly, we explored other factors hypothesized to be associated with unintended fertility, such as mastery (Kirby 2002) and closeness to parents (Santelli and Beilenson 1992). These analyses indicated weak associations with unintendeness net of variables already in the model. Additional measures of personality traits did not explain the association between early and later unintended fertility.

  2. Fecundity is the biological capacity to reproduce and is usually defined as the monthly probability of conception (given no contraception). Although fecundity changes across the life course, for any individual women fecundity at different ages is strongly correlated with early fecundity.

  3. In analyses not shown, we include two variables from Wave 1 that come close to what we seek to capture through conscientiousness. The results from these models are slightly conservative compared to what we obtain using the Wave 4 measure of conscientiousness. Results available upon request.

  4. While not shown here these basic findings also hold for the comparison of an unintended birth versus no birth. Results available upon request.

  5. As noted earlier, we carried out parallel analyses with the other four dimensions of personality and a measure of risk-proneness. (Results from these analyses are available on request.) We included these variables one at a time as a substitute for conscientiousness. Although openness and agreeableness had weak effects on intendedness of the second birth in bivariate models, they were not significant in models with basic controls. Further, none of the other personality dimensions attenuates the effects of an earlier unintended birth at all.

  6. Some readers will be troubled by the inclusion of the personality variable conscientiousness that is measured at Wave 4, after the outcomes of interest. Our approach assumes that personality traits are stable across adolescence and early adulthood (and thus the temporal ordering of conscientiousness and fertility is irrelevant). In contrast, religiosity and college aspirations are measured in adolescence and do not have this temporal ordering issue. Concerned readers may consider Model 3 (as opposed to 4) as the preferred model since it does not include the explicit measures of these variables. Other substantive conclusions are not affected by the inclusion/exclusion of these personality variables (as contrasts of models 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 show).

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Carolina Population Center (R24 HD050924) for general support. This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by Grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 206 W Franklin St, Room 208, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516, USA

    Sowmya Rajan

  2. Department of Sociology, Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 206 W Franklin St, Room 221, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516, USA

    S. Philip Morgan

  3. Department of Sociology, Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 206 W Franklin St, Room 201, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516, USA

    Kathleen Mullan Harris

  4. Department of Economics, Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 206 W Franklin St, Room 221, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516, USA

    David Guilkey

  5. Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, 238 Townsend Hall, 1885 Neil Avenue Mall, Columbus, OH, 43201-1222, USA

    Sarah R. Hayford

  6. Department of Sociology, Bowling Green State University, 212 Williams Hall, Bowling Green, OH, 43403, USA

    Karen Benjamin Guzzo

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  1. Sowmya Rajan
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Correspondence to S. Philip Morgan.

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Rajan, S., Morgan, S.P., Harris, K.M. et al. Trajectories of Unintended Fertility. Popul Res Policy Rev 36, 903–928 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-017-9443-3

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