Fertility Intentions of Canadian Women, 1990–2022, Using a Synthetic Cohort Approach

Benoît Laplante , Institut national de la recherche scientifique
Julie Blouin, Université du Québec à Montréal

Fertility has been decreasing in Canada since the 2008 financial crisis as it did elsewhere. A key question is whether fertility has fallen because people cannot have the children they want, or because they want fewer children. In this paper, we address the change in fertility intentions of Canadian women over the recent decades. We use data from seven surveys conducted between 1990 and 2022. We use a ‘pseudo-biographical’ approach: using cross-sectional data and multinomial logistic regression, we focus on the probability of intending to have a specific number of children conditional on parity This allows showing that intentions have a schedule as fertility itself. Integrating the probabilities over age allows estimating the proportion of the reproductive years spent intending to have any given number of children. Intentions have fallen since 2011, but especially since 2017. This fall is aligned with the fall of fertility. The decrease is most noticeable among young women, of which about half now begin their reproductive years intending to remain childless. The fertility intentions of Canadian women decreased over the last 30 years, and the main driver of the decrease seems to be the combined effect of decreasing intentions among childless women and the increasing proportion of childless women. Our results suggest that the decrease in fertility intentions is a likely cause of the recent decrease of fertility in Canada. They should contribute to inform the development of family policies in a context where fertility intentions are decreasing.

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 Presented in Session P1. Fertility, Family, Life Course