The Effect of Union Dissolution on the Fertility of Women in Montevideo-Uruguay

Mariana Fernández Soto , Programa de Población, Udelar
Benoit Laplante, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS)

In Uruguay, since the mid-1980s, transformations in the formation and the dissolution of conjugal unions have led to unions that are more flexible in their formation and less stable than they used to be. Alongside, fertility has been decreasing since the end of the 1990s, hovering around values close to those of population replacement since 2004. This research focuses on the effect of union dissolution on the fertility of Uruguayan women. We use data from a retrospective survey and a three-folded strategy to estimate this effect: decomposition of the ASFRS and of the cohort TFR by conjugal situation, Poisson regression, and a what-if approach. Results show that the contribution of fertility after the end of the first union has increased across cohorts. Also, its show that union instability does reduce fertility, but that the reduction was larger in the older cohorts than it is in the youngest one.

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 Presented in Session 231. The Union Context of Childbearing