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

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 experi...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of marriage and family 2013-08, Vol.75 (4), p.920-932
Main Authors: Frisco, Michelle L., Weden, Margaret
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adulthood
Adults
Age
Birth
Body mass index
Child Health
Childlessness
Children
Children & youth
Family planning
Female fertility
Females
Fertility
fertility/family planning/infertility
Infertility
life course
Longitudinal Studies
Obesity
Of General Interest
Overweight
Parents & parenting
Peers
Reproductive health
Sociology
Sociology of communication and mass media. Sociolinguistics
Sociology of knowledge and sociology of culture
Sociology of the body
transition to parenthood
U.S.A
Underweight
Women
Youth
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:0022-2445
1741-3737
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12049