Document Type
Article
Abstract
There is a large body of research examining women’s fertility decision-making. Yet this work rarely considers how women’s experiences with reproductive health conditions may be linked to their fertility goals, a problematic oversight given the growing emphases on reproductive careers and childbearing biographies that highlight the need to take a life course approach to fertility. Using the 2015–2019 National Survey of Family Growth (N = 8867), this paper examines how reproductive health conditions are associated with women’s fertility goals among women who are not surgically sterile or meet the medical definition of infertility. Slightly more than one in five women report at least one reproductive health condition. Multivariable logistic regressions show that women who report a diagnosis of any reproductive health condition are 34% more likely to desire a child than their peers with no such diagnoses. However, conditional on desiring a child, women with such diagnoses are 35% less likely to intend to have a child. These findings suggest that reproductive health conditions might be perceived as barriers to fulfilling fertility goals.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Population Research and Policy Review, Volume 45, Issue 10, 2026.
Rights
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
APA Citation
Guzzo, K. B., & Broussard, K. (2026). Women’s Reproductive Health Conditions and Fertility Goals. Population Research and Policy Review, 45(2).https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-026-09996-0