-

This account reports on a project in progress that aims to obtain a comprehensive picture of contemporary fertility levels and trends in 27 low-fertility countries. Cohort analysis is applied to review the fertility experience of women born from the 1930s through the 1970s. This choice of dates...

Combining cohort and period perspectives a method is developed that follows the process of childbearing postponement and recuperation and its reflection in total period fertility levels and trends in low fertility populations. It is complementary to methods pioneered by Bongaarts and Feeney...

Major changes in childbearing patterns are continuously taking place in the majority of low-fertility populations with postponement being virtually universal. Almost everywhere the two-child family became dominant. Proportions of childless women and one-child families were increasing recently....

Early in the 21st century modern contraception -- primarily hormonal methods, advanced IUDs, sterilization and condoms -- has become the main instrument of birth regulation in Northern and Western Europe and gaining ground in Southern Europe and the formerly state socialist countries of Central...

Societal conditions for early and high rates of childbearing were replaced by conditions generating late and low levels of fertility common in Western countries. Central among factors shaping the latter behaviour (job insecurity, unstable partnership relationships, expensive housing, and...

Major changes in the age patterns of fertility were characteristic of fertility trends following the Second World War. The paper provides an overview and analysis of changes in age patterns of cohort childbearing in low-fertility countries during the second half of the 20 th century. In Western...