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This article discusses how European women are historically bearing their first children later than ever before. In the United States and other countries, entry into parenthood is also seeing delays. Many experts argue that such fertility trends in developed countries are characterized by increasing, persistent, and arguably irreversible delays in childbearing in many socioeconomic conditions. Many of the informal age deadlines for childbearing are apparently being challenged and biological limits are being pushed. The article also presents information about the physiological aspects of late fertility and discusses the effect of new technologies on conception and pregnancy. Sweden's late and very late fertility is also examined.

The article presents the authors' views in response to a comment on their paper "Patterns of Low and Lowest-Low Fertility in Europe," published in a 2004 issue of the journal "Population Studies." In their comment, the critics have argued that the cohort-fertility analysis in the aforesaid paper is weak on theoretical grounds and the empirical analysis is incomplete. The authors affirm that they agree with the comment that, as a society, the Netherlands differs from Southern Europe and even more from Central and Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, from a contemporary global perspective, these differences should not be overemphasized. They say that in their analyses, they used the Netherlands as a reference case of a country with an extraordinary pattern of late childbearing that is not associated with lowest-low fertility levels. However, the critics believe that these unusual characteristics invalidate the use of the Dutch example in the paper. So, this criticism is misconceived. It is precisely the unusualness of the fertility pattern in the Netherlands that makes it a useful reference point in the study of low and lowest-low fertility.

In this paper we conduct descriptive aggregate analyses to revisit the relationship of low and lowest-low period fertility to cohort fertility and key fertility-related behaviour such as leaving the parental home, marriage, and women's labour force participation. Our analyses show that the cross-country correlations in Europe between total fertility and the total first marriage rate, the proportion of extramarital births, and the labour force participation of women reversed during the period from 1975 to 1999. By the end of the 1990s there was also no longer evidence that divorce levels were negatively associated with fertility levels. We argue that lowest-low fertility has been particularly associated with a 'falling behind' of cohort fertility at higher birth orders and later ages. From these analyses we conclude that the emergence of lowest-low fertility during the 1990s was accompanied by a disruption or even a reversal of many well-known relationships that have been used to explain cross-country differences in fertility patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lowest-low fertility, defined as a period total fertility rate at or below 1.3, has rapidly spread in Europe during the 1990s. This article traces the emergence of this new phenomenon to the interaction of five factors. First, tempo and compositional distortions reduce the total fertility rate below the associated level of cohort fertility. Second, socioeconomic changes--including increased returns to human capital and high economic uncertainty in early adulthood--have made late childbearing a rational response for individuals and couples. Third, social interaction effects reinforce this behavioral adjustment and contribute to large and persistent postponement in the mean age at birth. Fourth, institutional settings favor an overall low quantum of fertility. Fifth, postponement-quantum interactions amplify the consequences of this institutional setting when combined with ongoing delays of childbearing. The article concludes with speculations about future trends in current and prospective lowest-low-fertility countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a comment on an article which discussed a model of European age-specific fertility patterns using Hadwiger functions. The authors fit the functions to an array of European populations and, in order to interpret the parameters, show the high correlation between a and total fertility, c and mean age of the mother, and ab/c and the modal age specific fertility rate. The authors reflect the analytical relationship between the parameters of the Hadwiger function and the properties of such a function which are developed. As the authors conjectured, c is needed in the analytical mean age of the Hadwiger function, and the analytical total fertility is proportional to a. The analytical total fertility of Hadwiger functions can be obtained by integration over an interval, which requires the c parameter to be positive. In exploring the relationship between the modal age at childbearing and the Hadwiger parameters, the modal age was obtained by differentiating f(x) with respect to x and equaling to zero. The a parameter is just an intensity parameter which should not affect the modal age. The c parameter reflects mean age at childbearing, and that there should be a direct relationship between mean and modal ages.