Number and timing failures among legitimate births in the United States: 1968, 1969 and 1972

More than one in 10 legitimate births that occurred in the United States during 1968, 1969, and 1972 were not wanted at all, and more than one-quarter of the births were timing failures. A substantial reduction in unwanted childbearing took place between 1968 and 1972. The proportion of legitimate births reported by their mothers to be unwanted ever declined from 13 percent in 1968 to eight percent in 1972. If, as reported in a number of cross-sectional surveys taken during this approximate period, there was a sharp reduction in wanted family size reported by married women, then these women would have remained at risk of having an unwanted birth for a longer period than when their wanted family size had been higher. Thus, these estimates of a decline in unwanted childbearing may be understated (although there was the countervailing trend of later age at marriage during these years). The decline in unwanted childbearing between 1968 and 1972 is only partially attributable to the shift toward lower birth orders that occurred. Declines in unwanted births occurred for almost all birth orders. There was no significant reduction in mistimed births. Because the decline in unwanted fertility during the study period was much greater for nonwhites than whites, the traditional racial differential in unwanted childbearing narrowed considerably between 1968 and 1972. In 1968, 12 percent of the white legitimate births were classified as not wanted, compared to 21 percent of the legitimate births to nonwhites. However, between 1968 and 1972, nonwhites experienced extremely sharp declines in unwanted childbearing. Thus, in 1972 only 9.5 percent of the legitimate births to nonwhites were reported as unwanted, compared to 8.1 percent of the white births. Mothers of higher parity were much more likely to report a birth as unwanted than those of lower parity. Mothers who had completed more schooling were less likely than poorly educated mothers to report births as unwanted. Income level seems unrelated to whether the birth is unwanted, but is inversely related to whether it is a timing failure. Births that resulted from premarital conceptions tended to be reported as timing failures. Viewed from the cross-sectional perspective of period rates of population change, the elimination of unwanted legitimate childbearing would have had a substantial effect on population growth in each of the study years even without decreasing marital mistimed births or illegitimate fertility. The data also suggest that eliminating unwanted marital childbearing could significantly reduce completed family size. However, this conclusion must be viewed with great caution, since we do not know the future variations in timing and spacing of births, and the extent to which the childbearing experience of the sampled mothers is representative of their birth cohorts.