The 2000 censuses show that the proportion of women below age 30 who are mothers has dropped substantially in most Latin America countries, suggesting that the social imperative of early motherhood, which has long prevailed in the region, is weakening. Surveys conducted in 14 Latin American countries in 2006 also show a strong link between childlessness and higher education across several cohorts. We discuss whether the recent increase in childlessness among young women reflects a shift towards later childbearing, a novel trend in the Latin American context, and also whether it may signal an emerging retreat from universal childbearing in the region.

No abstract

In this paper, we reexamine two established findings concerning the effect of education on women's family formation. In addition to considering educational choices as a way of accumulating human capital, we also see them as expressing orientations concerning future roles, and as a place of socialization. This leads us to consider not only the level of education but also the type of education. Furthermore, we investigate whether the timing of departure from education and entering into parenthood are jointly determined. In order to disentangle these issues, we use the Spanish Family and Fertility Survey and apply event history models that take into account the presence of unobserved heterogeneity. Our results show that the type of education is as important as the level of education undertaken by women. More precisely, those academic studies concerned with the care of individuals and/or which emphasize interpersonal skills, in turn have a positive influence on the timing of first birth in Spain, irrespective of the level of education. We also find that both processes are partially determined by common (unmeasured) determinants.

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.

No abstract