The stress of high milk production, along with increasing herd size and changes in facilities and management, has made fertility one of the main focuses of genetic improvement today. In the US, the reduction in calving rate to first service and the impact of this decrease in fertility on the Holstein breed, mainly in the last 20 years, is of major concern [27]. Figure 1 shows the clear trend fo...

Human fertility has declined in all of the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries in the recent years, Iran had the largest decline, however. What factors have affected the fertility decline in Iran, and as compared with other MENA countries, is the question of this paper. Fertility, higher education, and other measures were used for comparison. Regression analysis was also carried out ...

Traditionally, the quality of fertility care is defined by outcome measures such as live birth or complication rate. Nowadays, patient centeredness in healthcare is receiving more attention and patient evaluation of sub fertility care is being given more consideration as an important treatment outcome. High quality ART covers all six dimensions of high quality care, including safety, effectiven...

Demographers have known since the 1940s that standard measures of period fertility, such as the widely used total fertility rate, are distorted by changes in the timing of childbearing. Period fertility rates are depressed during years in which women delay childbearing and inflated in years when childbearing is accelerated. This problem is usually ignored because there has been no generally acc...

Discussions about fertility in developed countries refer almost exclusively to the period Total Fertility Rate (TFR). We argue that the use of this indicator frequently leads to incorrect interpretations of period fertility levels and trends, resulting in distorted policy conclusions and, potentially, in misguided policies. We illustrate this with four policy-relevant examples, drawn from conte...

Genome-wide association studies for difficult-to-measure traits are generally limited by the sample population size with accurate phenotypic data. The objective of this study was to utilise data on primiparous Holstein-Friesian cows from experimental farms in Ireland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Sweden to identify genomic regions associated with traditional measures of fertility, as...

Ever since attempts were made to construct quantitative measures of individual fertility preferences and intentions, the interpretation of these measures has been controversial. Women in developing countries often have more children than they desire. This is particularly the case in Latin America, where the relative gap between actual and desired fertility levels is larger than in any other maj...

This paper investigates whether there has been a fundamental change in the importance of economic conditions on fertility. Through the 1980s econometric studies had found at best a mixed, neutral or negative effect of economic conditions on fertility. Notably, Butz and Ward (1979) concluded that fertility was counter-cyclical, with fertility falling in good times, as the opportunity costs of ch...