Abstract
Life history theory predicts that where mortality/morbidity is high, earlier reproduction will be favoured. A key component of reproductive decision-making in high income contexts is induced abortion. Accordingly, relationships between mortality/morbidity and ‘abortion proportion’ (proportion of conceptions ending in abortion) are explored at small-area (‘ward’) level in England and Wales. It is predicted that where mortality/morbidity is high, there will be a lower ‘abortion proportion’ in younger women (<25years), adjusting for education, unemployment, income, housing tenure and population density. Results show that this prediction is supported: wards with both shorter life expectancy and a higher proportion of people with a limiting long-standing illness have lower abortion proportions in under 25s. In older age bands, in contrast, elevated mortality and morbidity are mostly associated with a higher ‘abortion proportion’. Further, morbidity appears to have a larger effect than mortality on ‘abortion proportion’ in the under-25 age band, perhaps because a) morbidity is be more salient than mortality in high-income contexts, and/or b) young women are influenced by health of potential female alloparents when scheduling fertility.
Highlights
Education shows a similar ‘age flip’ to mortality and morbidity, in that the relationship between it and abortion proportion is positive in age bands b 25 and 25–29; and becomes negative for age bands 30–34 and 35 and over
Unemployment is consistently positively related to abortion proportion across age bands, while income is the same but with a tiny effect size
Our results suggest that deprivation matters over and above either mortality or morbidity risk, which in turn suggests that deprivation is unsurprisingly an indicator of more than just health risks
Summary
Life history theory posits that over the life course organisms face tradeoffs in allocating energy between competing functions such as growing, learning, mating, reproducing and self-care (Roff, 1992; Stearns, 1992). Across 22 small-scale human societies, high mortality rates were associated with earlier age at menarche and earlier reproduction (Walker et al, 2006). Such adaptations can happen over evolutionary time (Migliano, Vinicius, & Lahr, 2007); or within a lifespan, environmental cues can influence an organism's phenotype via evolved adaptive mechanisms. Within human lifespans, such effects may occur via physiological and psychological mechanisms (Del Giudice & Belsky, 2011; Nettle, 2011). As long as individuals are receiving enough calories to be fertile, mortality is expected to influence reproductive scheduling (Belsky, Schlomer, & Ellis, 2012)
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