Bearing the Reproductive Load? Unequal Reproductive Careers Among U.S. Women

Reproductive events such as infertility, abortion, or unintended pregnancies are often framed as discrete outcomes in scholarly research. This silo-ed approach is quite distinct from how people experience their reproductive lives as embodied and interconnected throughout the life course. In this analysis, we build on and further a "reproductive careers" framework to better account for the number (density) and distinct types (complexity) of reproductive events that cisgender women experience across their life course. We incorporate insights from scholarship on stratified reproduction, cumulative (dis)advantage, and health to conceptualize and empirically examine how women's reproductive careers are potentially unequally patterned. Using reproductive history data on 4351 U.S. women from the National Survey of Fertility Barriers, we find that Black and Hispanic women, women of lower socioeconomic status, and women with limited healthcare access have both denser and more complex reproductive careers than their more structurally advantaged peers. As summary indicators, density and complexity may offer proxies for the "reproductive load" that subgroups of women differentially experience across the life course.