Age and Fertility: Can women wait until their early thirties to try for a first birth?
A lecture by John W. `Mac' McDonald, Professor of Longitudinal Social Statistics, Centre for Longitudinal Studies, Institute of Education, London.
Postponing the start of childbearing raises the question of fertility postponed versus fertility foregone. One of the limitations of previous studies of "How late can you wait?'' is that any observed decline in the probability of conception with age could be due to a decline in fecundability with age or due to a decline in coital frequency with age or due to both factors.
Using data from a multinational prospective study conducted to determine the daily probability of conception among healthy subjects, we study the relationship between age and fecundability for childless women, while controlling for the pattern of intercourse within a menstrual cycle relative to day of ovulation. Our analysis is based on a two-population (fecund, sterile) mixture model that simultaneously combines a discrete-time hazard model of waiting time to first conception for those fecund with a logistic regression model for primary sterility.
The event will take place in Meeting Room 1.07, University of Edinburgh Main Library, George Square.
