Issues related to family planning have profound public health significance as they directly impact individuals, couples, and families throughout the world. A new method of family planning is now available using a computerized fertility monitor that accurately measures urinary surges in estrone-3-glucuronide (E3G) and luteinizing hormone (LH) prior to ovulation, thus identifying the short-lived ...

Radical declines in fertility and postponement of first reproduction during the recent human demographic transitions have posed a challenge to interpreting human behaviour in evolutionary terms. This challenge has stemmed from insufficient evolutionary insight into individual reproductive decision-making and the rarity of datasets recording individual long-term reproductive success throughout t...

Timing of first reproduction is a key life-history variable with important implications for global economic development and health. Life-history theory predicts that human reproductive strategies are shaped by mortality regimes. This study provides the first test of the relationship between population-level adolescent fertility (AF) and extrinsic risk at two time points. Data are from United Na...

The current total fertility rate in France is around 1.9 children per woman. This is a relatively high level by current European standards and makes France an outlier, despite the fact that its other demographic trends, especially conjugal behaviour, and social and economic trends are not very different from other Western European countries. France can serve as a counterfactual test case for so...

Contemporary research of fertility behaviour that considers simultaneous longitudinal and prospective inclusion of individual and contextual levels of observation increases its explanatory power of explanation. The only research data of the kind in Slovenian is Fertility behaviour of Slovenians which was a part of international project the Family and Fertility Survey (FFS), carried out in 1995....

The link between employment and fertility is often only examined by focussing on women's labour market status or the impact of part- versus full-time employment. This study introduces a new explanation by extending research to examine how women's subjective perceptions of control or autonomy over work, job strain and work-family conflict influence fertility intentions. National-level measures o...

ƒ Typically, fertility has a pro-cyclical relationship with economic growth. Recessions often lead to a temporary decline in period fertility levels one or two years later, partly reflecting a postponement of childbearing that is often later compensated during the period of improved economic conditions. ƒ Theories suggesting a counter-cyclical relationship between economic trends and fertility ...

In the course of demographic transitions (DTs), two large-scale trends become apparent: (i) the broadly positive association between wealth, status and fertility tends to reverse, and (ii) wealth inequalities increase and then temporarily decrease. We argue that these two broad patterns are linked, through a diversification of reproductive strategies that subsequently converge as populations co...

Human reproductive behaviour is marked by exceptional variation at the population and individual level. Human behavioural ecologists propose adaptive hypotheses to explain this variation as shifting phenotypic optima in relation to local socioecological niches. Here we review evidence that variation in fertility (offspring number), in both traditional and modern industrialized populations, repr...