Some 20 years after unification, the contrast between East and West Germany provides a unique natural experiment for studying the persistence of communist-era family patterns, the effects of economic change, and the complexities of the process of fertility postponement. After unification, fertility rates plummeted in the former East Germany to record low levels. The number of births per year fe...

The 1970s worries of the "population bomb" were replaced in the 1990s with concerns of population aging driven by falling birth rates. Across the developed world, the nearly universallyused fertility indicator, the period total fertility rate, fell well below two children per woman. However, declines in period fertility have largely been an artifact of later – but not necessarily less – childbe...

Recent research has documented a variety of ovulatory cues in humans, and in many nonhuman species, the vocal channel provides cues of reproductive state. We collected two sets of vocal samples from 69 normally ovulating women: one set during the follicular (high-fertility) phase of the cycle and one set during the luteal (low-fertility) phase, with ovulation confirmed by luteinizing hormone te...

BACKGROUND We investigated coping strategies and communication strategies as predictors of fertility problem stress 12 months after start of fertility treatment. METHODS We used a prospective, longitudinal cohort design including 2250 people beginning fertility treatment with a 12-month follow-up. Data were based on self-administered questionnaires measuring communication with partner and wit...

Background: Infertility leads to profound human suffering, particularly on the women. Women's lack of pregnancy is both physically and socially visible, especially in high fertility societies where women are typically blamed for reproductive failures, even in cases of male infertility. Childless women are more likely to be the victims of domestic violence and may also endure various forms ...

Fertility levels have fallen drastically in most industrialized countries. Diverse theoretical and empirical frameworks have had difficulty explaining these unprecedented low levels of fertility. More recently, however, attention has turned from classic explanations, such as women’s increased labour market participation, to gender equity as the essential link to understand this phenomenon. Incr...

While new empirical findings and theoretical frameworks provide insight into the interrelations between socioeconomic development, gender equity, and low fertility, puzzling exceptions and outliers in these findings call for a more all-encompassing framework to understand the inter-play between these processes. We argue that the pace and onset of development are two important factors to be cons...

This paper finds that fertility responds to productivity differently depending upon the economy’s stage of development. At low levels of development, productivity increases will increase fertility while at the more advanced stages of development, productivity increases lower fertility. During the process there may be important interaction effects between productivity and education demand. Incre...

European continent has been for-runner in the demographic transition process. Age-specific fertility patterns had changed tremendously during this process in Europe. However, it is still mainly concentrated in the female age group 20 – 34 years. Women and couples tend to limit fertility in marginal age groups of female's reproductive period. In this paper the author addresses late agespecific f...