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Fertility and the changing pattern of the timing of childbearing in Colombia

“…Moreover, the prominence of sterilisation in the contraceptive method mix has been put forward as a reason for reduced birth spacing, accompanied by a reduction of fertility at higher parities at earlier stages of fertility transition (Bonneuil and Medina 2009;Parrado 2000). Therefore, the role of contraceptive use in the observed changes in the timing of childbearing (both first and second births) could be further explored in order to cast light on the identified patterns.…”

“…This allowed young women aged 15−19 years to postpone first births through lowering the costs of delaying motherhood (Miller 2010). Nevertheless, previous studies have identified birth-limiting behaviour as opposed to birth-spacing behaviour as the more important component of Colombian fertility decline (Parrado 2000). However, recent cross-country comparative analysis by Casterline and Odden (2016) uncovered the existence of particularly long birth intervals between first and second births at low fertility levels in Latin American countries, including Colombia.…”

“…Previous analyses for Colombia have focused on the transition to first birth. Scant attention has been paid to studying the timing of birth orders higher than one and there is no recent evidence about these processes (Bongaarts 1999;Parrado 2000). In the next step, the Bongaarts and Feeney (1998) method is used to study the existence of the tempo effects in the TFR changes.…”