BIOSFER - Untangling biologic and social causes of low fertility in modern societies
About the project
-
Project period: 01.03.2023 - 01.03.2029 (Active)
- Coordinating Institution: Norwegian Institute of Public Health
-
Project Manager:
- Siri Eldevik Håberg, Centre for Fertility and Health
-
Project Participant:
- Katrine Kranstad, Centre for Fertility and Health
Summary
High-income countries are experiencing unprecedentedly low and increasingly polarized fertility. Social gradients are growing, with a particularly pronounced increase in childlessness in low socioeconomic groups. Key fertility theories have been based on the observation that fertility remained comparatively high in gender-egalitarian countries with strong support for families. Since 2010 many of the countries that provided evidence for such theories have reached record-low fertility. This confronts the scientific paradigm of the drivers of fertility.
BIOSFER investigates how social, biological and psychological forces produce the emerging fertility patterns in young adults, and to what extent the fertility decline and polarization can be attributed to social vs. biomedical factors. Key barriers to answering this question are inadequate data and theoretical frameworks. We leverage ideas from several disciplines and propose that the existing theories must be complemented with concepts of risk aversion, intergenerational transmission of fecundity, epigenetics and beyond, in order to understand modern fertility. We develop theoretically informed, falsifiable hypotheses that we test against the two richest population-based longitudinal pregnancy and pubertal cohorts in the world, The Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study and the Danish National Birth Cohort.
We offer a uniquely integrative life-course perspective that is neither social or biomedical, but combines central ideas from both. We evaluate the biosocial determinants of the key transitions from fetal life through puberty and partnering into planned, unplanned, partnered and unpartnered childbearing. We study how social, biomedical, psychological, and intergenerational forces operate throughout the life-course to produce the modern low-fertility landscape. The results will provide a novel, bio-social framework for understanding the life-course processes that drive contemporary fertility patterns.