Older Maternal Ages, Increasing Rates of Planned Births, and Shifts from Births Wanted Later to Births Wanted Sooner

Constanza Hurtado, Carolina Population Center, UNC Chapel Hill
Michael S. Rendall, University of Maryland College Park

In the last three decades in the U.S., maternal ages have increased at an unprecedented pace. Using two questions from the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, available for seven states from 2007-2020 and for 14 states from 2012-2020, we analyze the contribution of increasing maternal ages to increases in births occurring later than wanted and decreases in births occurring sooner than wanted. Additionally, we investigate the association between the trend toward older mothers and increases in ‘planned births,’ a measure that distinguishes between births conceived when the woman was trying to get pregnant and, if not, whether the woman was using contraception. Because of the historical inequalities in birth intentions by race, we also analyze these associations for Black women separately. For all women and for Black women, we find that about one-third of the decrease in births wanted later and half of the increase in births wanted sooner is explained by increasing maternal ages. For Black women only, we find that changes in age composition suppress an increase among women in unplanned births through not using contraception when not trying to get pregnant. For both groups, increasing maternal age explains two-thirds of the increase in ‘planned’ births.

Keywords: Fertility, Family Planning and Contraception, Decomposition analysis

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