Union Instability as an Engine of Fertility? A Microsimulation Model for France

Abstract

Opportunities for conceiving and bearing children are fewer when unions are not formed or are dissolved during the childbearing years. At the same time, union instability produces a pool of persons who may enter new partnerships and have additional children in stepfamilies. The balance between these two opposing forces and their implications for fertility may depend on the timing of union formation and parenthood. In this article, we estimate models of childbearing, union formation, and union dissolution for female respondents to the 1999 French Etude de l’Histoire Familiale. Model parameters are applied in microsimulations of completed family size. We find that a population of women whose first unions dissolve during the childbearing years will end up with smaller families, on average, than a population in which all unions remain intact. Because new partnerships encourage higher parity progressions, repartnering minimizes the fertility gap between populations with and those without union dissolution. Differences between the two populations are much smaller when family formation is postponed—that is, when union formation and dissolution or first birth occurs after age 30, or when couples delay childbearing after union formation.

Childlessness in the UK

“…Postponement and childlessness may be causally related, e.g. through reduced fecundity with age, but both are also manifestations of underlying changes in women's lives, such as opportunities for women to develop a career, the availability of reliable contraception, and increased partnership postponement and instability (Murphy 1993;Hobcraft and Kiernan 1995;Thomson et al 2012).…”

Educational differences in timing and quantum of childbearing in Britain

“…This period also saw a change in the timing of work and family so that women became increasingly likely to establish a role in the labour market prior to childbearing, instead of entering parenthood first and the labour market later (Ni Bhrolchaín 1986). It is not possible to say from available data whether there is a causal relationship between the two trends, since postponement and childlessness could both be regarded as manifestations of underlying changes in women's lives, most notably opportunities for women to develop a career (Kotowska et al 2008;Matysiak and Vignoli 2008), the availability of reliable contraception (Murphy 1993), and increased partnership postponement and instability (Hobcraft and Kiernan 1995;Thomson et al 2012). Underlying this is an enduring incompatibility in our cohorts between the demands of a high-level career and family life for women.…”

Reforging the Wedding Ring

“…Bracher, Watkins, and Santow (2003), for instance, used micro-simulation to examine the likelihood of newly married men and women in Malawi being HIV-positive, given prevalent infection and marriage rates. Similarly, Thomson et al (2012) studied the implications for fertility of different levels of divorce and remarriage in developed countries based on data from France.…”