Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2013 Aug 1;75(4):920-932.
doi: 10.1111/jomf.12049.

Early Adult Obesity and U.S. Women's Lifetime Childbearing Experiences

Michelle L Frisco  1 , Margaret Weden
Affiliations

Early Adult Obesity and U.S. Women's Lifetime Childbearing Experiences

Michelle L Frisco et al. J Marriage Fam. .

Abstract

Literature from multiple disciplines suggests that women who are obese during early adulthood may accumulate social and physiological impediments to childbearing across their reproductive lives. This led the authors to investigate whether obese young women have different lifetime childbearing experiences than leaner peers by analyzing data from 1,658 female participants in the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Study sample members were nulliparous women ages 20 - 25 in 1982. The authors examined their childbearing experiences between 1982 and 2006 and found that young women who were obese at baseline had higher odds of remaining childless and increased odds of underachieving fertility intentions than young women who were normal weight at baseline. These results suggest that obesity has long-term ramifications for women's childbearing experiences, with respect to whether and how many children women have in general and relative to the number of children they want.

Keywords: childlessness; fertility/family planning/infertility; life course; obesity; transition to parenthood.

PubMed Disclaimer

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Acock AC. Working with missing values. Journal of Marriage and Family. 2005;67:1012–1028. doi:10.1111/j.1741-3737.2005.00191.
    1. Allison PD. Missing data. Sage; Thousand Oaks, CA: 2001.
    1. Amba JC, Martinez GM. Childlessness among older women in the United States: Trends and profiles. Journal of Marriage and Family. 2006;68:1045–1056. doi:10.1111/j.1741-3737.2006.00312.
    1. Baltrus PT, Lynch JW, Everson-Rose S, Raghunathan T, Kaplan G. Race/ethnicity, life course socioeconomic position, and body weight trajectories over 34 years: The Alameda County Study. American Journal of Public Health. 2005;95:1595–1601. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2004.046292. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Blackwell DL, Hayward MD, Crimmins EM. Does childhood health affect chronic morbidity in later life? Social Science & Medicine. 2001;52:1269–1284. doi:10.1016/S0277-9536(00)00230-6. - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources