Abstract
Recognizing the prolonged, uneven, and evolving nature of the Covid-19 pandemic, this study provides one of the first dynamic, multilevel perspectives of women's fertility intentions in response to the pandemic and its multifaceted impacts. We examine how evolving individual- and community-level Covid-19 risk mechanisms and socioeconomic and life-course conditions are associated with continuity and change in women's fertility intentions. We combine individual-level panel data from a population-based sample of women aged 18–34 in Pernambuco, Brazil in 2020 and 2021 with corresponding administrative data from 94 municipalities. We use multinomial logit regressions to model continuity and change in fertility intentions across waves. We then estimate fixed effect models to highlight the time-varying determinants of changing fertility intentions while accounting for unobserved, time-invariant individual factors. We find that high and/or increasing individual and community-level Covid-19 exposure is associated with a greater likelihood of abandoning initial childbearing plans and a greater likelihood to maintain intentions to forego versus to intend having additional children. We advance the literature by highlighting how individual-level Covid-19 infection risk perceptions matter for fertility intentions, net of community-level exposure, and the necessity of dynamic perspectives for understanding how fertility intentions have changed (or not) in response to the pandemic.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 213-242 |
| Number of pages | 30 |
| Journal | Population and Development Review |
| Volume | 50 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 2024 |
Funding
This research was funded by Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development under grant R01HD091257 Reproductive Responses to the Zika Virus Epidemic in Brazil (awarded to the principal investigator L. J. Marteleto) and under grant P2CHD042849 (awarded to the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin). This study was conducted under Institutional Review Board approval #2018‐01‐0055 from the University of Texas at Austin and the Brazilian National Commission for Research Ethics (also known as CONEP or Comissão Nacional de Ética em Pesquisa) study approval CAAE: 34032920.1.0000.5149. The authors would like to thank the reviewers and editors for their helpful suggestions on previous drafts of this paper.
Keywords
- Brazil
- Covid-19
- Epidemics
- Fertility intentions
- Latin America
- Structural shocks
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Demography
- Development
- Sociology and Political Science