This study builds on the peer effects in adolescent fertility literature by examining close friends and using miscarriages as a natural experiment to reduce potential confounding due to peer selection, simultaneity of peer influence, and shared environment. Our identifying assumption is that, conditional on a friend’s pregnancy, the occurrence of a friend’s miscarriage is an exogenous negative ...

Facing a cancer diagnosis at any age is devastating. However, young cancer patients have the added burden that life-preserving cancer treatments, including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy, may compromise their future fertility. The possibility of reproductive dysfunction as a consequence of cancer treatment has a negative impact on the quality of life of cancer survivors. The field of o...

Due to the high population growth rate in the mid-20th century, the government of Ghana introduced population policies to reduce the population growth rate. Encouraging girls’ education and increasing contraceptive use were the two main policy measures to reduce population growth. Subsequently, the total fertility rate (TFR) declined rapidly from 6.0 in 1985 to 4.3 in 2003. Using 2003 Ghana Dem...

The aim of this thesis was to explore conditions for selection and genetic improvement of fertility and longevity in dairy cattle. The background is that single-trait selection for milk production is known to lead to impaired fertility and consequently to shorter lifespan. This in turn results in financial losses and ethical concerns. Since many years, the Swedish dairy farmers have recorded mi...

Bringing together emerging lessons from biophysical and social sciences as well as newly available data, we take stock of what can be learned about the relationship among subjective (reported) and objective (measured) soil fertility and farmer input use in east Africa. We identify the correlates of Kenyan and Tanzanian maize farmers’ reported perceptions of soil fertility and assess the extent ...

The interests of males and females in mating contexts often conflict, and identifying the information conveyed by sexual signals is central to understanding how signalers manage such conflicts. Research into the information provided by female primate sexual signals has focused on exaggerated anogenital swellings as either reliable-indicators of reproductive quality (reliable-indicator hypothesi...

BACKGROUND Infertility has a negative impact on quality of life (QoL) and well-being of affected individuals and couples. A variety of patient-reported outcome (PRO) measures to assess infertility-related QoL are available; however, there is a concern regarding potential issues with their development methodology, validation and use. This review aimed to i) identify PRO measures used in infertil...

OBJECTIVE Increasing age at first childbirth has been suggested to increase the risk for infertility. Our objective is to determine whether women above thirty years of age historically have been able to sustain fertility rates above replacement level. DESIGN A descriptive nationwide Danish study using birth registries from 1901-2014. SETTING Information on women's age at childbirth was obta...