ABSTRACT
This and the next three chapters will be concerned with the analysis of fertility, or the propensity of the women in a population to bear children. Many of the ideas already developed in the context of the analysis of mortality and nuptiality can be applied to the analysis of fertility. In two respects at least, however, the analysis of fertility presents more difficulties than the analysis of mortality.
Whereas people only die once, women may have several children. Thus fertility involves the analysis of a repeated event.
Whereas death is normally determined by physiological and medical factors which are only influenced to a limited degree by human action (in other words, people do not usually choose to die), fertility in most populations is subject to individual choice (although the precise extent to which individual choice governs fertility varies widely).
