Reproduction in upheaval: ethnic-specific fertility responses to societal turbulence in Kazakhstan

This study contributes to the literature on demographic adjustments to societal crises by examining ethnicspecific probabilities of having first, second, and third marital births in late-twentieth-century Kazakhstan. Discrete-time logit models, employing data from the 1995 and 1999 Kazakhstan Demographic and Health Surveys, are fitted. The results show that the probability of a first birth responded to societal cataclysms of the post-Soviet transition, but this response was most manifest and enduring in the ethnic group that had been most demographically advanced and that also found itself most politically and economically vulnerable. While ethnic differences in the probabilities of second and third births were generally more pronounced than in the probability of first birth, the pace of their post-Soviet decline was relatively uniform across all ethnic groups. Keywords: fertility; ethnicity; Soviet Union; Kazakhstan; Central Asia; societal crisis