The Impact of Women's Employment on Second and Third Births in Modern Sweden.

This article presents partial results from a study of the relation between trends in women's labour-force participation and second and third births in which other individual-level factors are taken into consideration the woman's education, her social background, and her previous demographic behavior. Although men and women entered their first conjugal union at steadily younger ages, they delayed their first births considerably, so that by 1981 only half of all 26-year-old Swedish women had begun childbearing, compared with about two-thirds 10-15 years earlier. This does not necessarily mean, however, that a higher proportion will remain childless. Most women continued to want children, and the majority of them wanted two children and achieved that aim. Only a small proportion felt satisfied with one child, and there were very few young women who had not yet borne children who expected to remain childless by the end of their reproductive period. A large part of the decline in fertility in Sweden was caused by the sharp drop in the number of third births after the middle 1960s, and it is generally believed that increases in the numbers of third births have contributed much to the recent moderate recovery in Swedish fertility.