Farewell’s children. Using the life course perspective to understand female late fertility

Abstract

This chapter maps the complexity of studying inequalities across age-female-fertility decisions and outcomes. In so doing, it advocates for a life-course perspective and longitudinal analysis while presenting innovation in the field. Based upon the author’s previous empirical work, and an updated literature review, hypotheses are put forward to understand fertility from 40 onwards as a complex process where the individual actor is at the core of the life-course. Illustrations are given on how time-domain-level interdependencies, and their multiple interactions are central to achieve more comprehensive and rigorous understandings of contemporary life courses. Making use of the theoretical insights of the life-course perspective one might argue that, in deciding to have children after “a certain age”, women anticipating consequences of their behaviour or observing changes in their environments are following their subjective beliefs about what will best serve their well-being. Accordingly, what they perceive as “good reasons” is strongly shaped by their prior biographical experiences, including prior knowledge, expertise, values and attitudes (the “shadows of the past”), as well as by the more or less uncertain expectations about the consequences of a given action and the consequences of such action for other future actions (the “shadows of the future”). At the end, the overcoming of social and biological limits imposed by age on fertility places those women as unsynchronized before the traditional family calendar while synchronized before their own life-course.