ABSTRACT
Over the past decades, European countries have witnessed profound changes in population trends. In the mid-1960s, in most European countries, people entered into marriages, and to a lesser extent unions, at early ages. The proportion of the population never entering a union (married or unmarried) was at a historical low level. Marriage was quickly followed by the birth of a first child. Nearly universal parenthood and frequent progression to second, but also third and higher-order births kept fertility well above the replacement level. Although less pronounced than in the US, many European countries witnessed a baby boom, producing large cohorts of new-borns between 1945 and the mid-1960s.
