Childbearing within Marriage and Consensual Union in Latin America, 1980–2010

Benoît Laplante, Teresa Castro-Martín, Clara Cortina and Teresa Martín-García

Population and Development Review, 2015, vol. 41, issue 1, 85-108

Abstract: type="main">

This article compares the fertility patterns of women in consensual union and marriage in 13 Latin American countries, using census microdata from the four most recent census rounds and a methodological approach that combines the own-children method and Poisson regression. Results show that in all these countries, fertility is slightly higher within consensual union than marriage and that the age pattern of fertility is very similar in marital and non-marital unions. Further analyses show that over the period considered, childbearing within a consensual union has changed from rare to increasingly common, although not yet mainstream, for highly educated women in most countries examined. Results show that in Latin America, at least since the 1980s, women's childbearing patterns depend on their age and on their being in a conjugal relationship, but not on the legal nature of this relationship. The similarities in reproductive behavior between marital and non-marital unions are not confined to the socially disadvantaged groups, but apply as well to the better off.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2015.00027.x (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:popdev:v:41:y:2015:i:1:p:85-108

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0098-7921

Access Statistics for this article

Population and Development Review is currently edited by Paul Demeny and Geoffrey McNicoll

More articles in Population and Development Review from The Population Council, Inc.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().