An Investigation of the Timing Pattern of Childbearing

This paper reports an investigation of the relation between the number of live births during a woman's reproductive life and her ages at those births. The distribution of these ages for every final parity, which will be referred to as the timing distribution of childbearing conditional upon final parity, and the distribution of final parity together contain all the information about fertility for any population. However, while the distribution of final parities has been studied intensively, the timing distribution has received little attention. Indeed, the complete timing distribution requires reproductive histories of individual women who have completed childbearing and such statistics are difficult to obtain. As a result, it appears that this distribution has not previously been studied in its entirety.