Fertility Risk in the Life-Cycle

In this paper I study fertility decisions of women in the U.S. economy, with special emphasis on the timing of births and abortions over the life-cycle. Given the constant policy debate regarding abortion availability and recent empirical evidence of its positive impact on women outcomes, understanding the fertility process in a broad sense should help guide the discussion. In this paper I present a life-cycle model of consumption-savings and fertility decisions in an environment with uninsurable income shocks and imperfect fertility control. My model presents a unified framework in which both opportunity costs of child rearing and technological restrictions (in the form of contraception effectiveness) have roles to understand lifetime fertility choices.