Later fertility in Europe

The project, set up at the Vienna University of economics and business (WU), addresses two fundamental issues. First, it assesses how the expansion of university education and changing partnership behaviour (notably later union formation and more separations) have contributed to the increase in late childbearing and childlessness, and to the change in fertility levels. Second, it explores the implications of fertility postponement for family size of men and women finishing their reproductive life today and in the future. We first take a micro-level perspective in order to understand who postponed childbearing. We then link individual mechanisms of postponement such as increase in educational enrolment and the change in partnership dynamics to the overall fertility indicators, also in cohorts still of childbearing age today. We finally study the aggregate trends towards later fertility, and how many people might be constrained by biological and societal limits to childbearing notably by sex and level of education. Building up on our findings, we will discuss the consequences of continued delay in childbearing for future family size, and whether recourse to Assisted Reproductive Technologies or change in the perception of late fertility could increase the possibility to have children late. We use a comparative approach between Austria, France and other European countries to investigate whether the processes leading to later childbearing are common to these countries. We also compare late and possibly forgone fertility in these countries, keeping in mind the variation in institutional settings. We combine individual and aggregate perspectives to study educational and gender differences in late fertility and in childlessness for women and men who have completed childbearing. We also apply microsimulation to assess the possible future consequences of the changes in education and partnership behaviour among todays young adults. This project is innovative in a number of ways. The combination of individual- and aggregate-level studies, reinforced by a microsimulation, is a novel approach. The project also enhances past research by providing a comprehensive view of the context, drivers and consequences of increasingly late fertility. The comparison of men and women is particularly valuable since fertility-related topics have been mostly analysed from womens perspective only. Finally, the explorations of the contrast in family behaviours of people from different educational groups will beneficiate from this new insight linking length of education and level of education to family size. The project will inform research in demography, but also in public health, family policies and ageing, through scientific publications and participation in conferences. Beside scientific activities, we are planning an open day during which the main results of the research will be exposed to non-scientific audience, and we will publish our main findings in briefing papers targeted to media and policy makers. More generally, the project will provide evidence to enable policy makers to better understand how societal changes and targeted policies could support the adaptation to the shift to later childbearing.

The LATEFERT project examined late fertility in countries where people delay childbearing. It showed a large cross-country variation in late fertility, which appears to result both from differences in the extent of childbearing delay and from different structural or normative constraints on the ability to catch up with births at later ages. At the same time, in most countries family size at later ages has not increased sufficiently to compensate for the later start of childbearing, so that cohort fertility levels have declined. The project has helped to show that people increasingly want to have children at more advanced reproductive ages (35 and over), especially childless women. However, it has also clearly shown that people who want to have children at this age are less likely to do so than at earlier ages, especially less educated women. This seems to be related to a mix of physiological constraints that significantly reduce the chances of having a live birth at an advanced age, normative age constraints on the perception of the best age to have children, and life constraints such as not meeting the right partner in time. On the other hand, the anticipation of biological constraints seems to encourage births before it is 'too late' to have a child, as we observed both women and men accelerating a birth in a late partnership or after late entry into parenthood. Overall, this project has made enormous progress in understanding the consequences of delayed fertility. For societies, the effort needed to recover births at older ages after a delay at earlier ages is very large, so that very few countries are actually catching up with the missing births. For individuals, more and more people are foregoing childbearing because they have delayed too long. Recognising that the fertility decline in the 20s is strong and that there is little that can be done to stop it, we recommend that policy-makers step up their efforts to facilitate childbearing among people in their early 30s, before reproductive capacity starts to decline. Given that this is an age when most people are in work, the best way to do this is through policies that make it sound reasonable to have a family while working: involving men in the family sphere through greater gender equality, making good quality and publicly funded childcare available to all, and promoting work-life flexibility. In addition, informing both men and women about the declining physiological capacity to have children from the age of 35 for women and 40 for men seems central to the development of well-informed fertility decisions in times of delayed fertility.