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. 2017 Dec;36(6):903-928.
doi: 10.1007/s11113-017-9443-3. Epub 2017 Sep 27.

Trajectories of Unintended Fertility

Sowmya Rajan  1 , S Philip Morgan  1 , Kathleen Mullan Harris  1 , David Guilkey  1 , Sarah R Hayford  2 , Karen Benjamin Guzzo  3
Affiliations

Trajectories of Unintended Fertility

Sowmya Rajan et al. Popul Res Policy Rev. 2017 Dec.

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=8,300) 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 unplanned birth. We propose several mechanisms that might explain this strong association.

Keywords: life course; selection; state dependence; unintended fertility.

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