Fecundity and family structure in Spain

Mar Llorente, Universidad de Oviedo
Montserrat Diaz, Universidad de Oviedo

The 20th Century was a period of great social change in Spain, a change that especially affected the region’s reproductive order. Women’s increasing role in the labour market and their participation in the social and educational fields created new patterns of family organisation social that resulted in previously unknown levels of fecundity. The aim of this document is to analyse the internal structure of fecundity within the Spain. Firstly, the analysis will be from an overall perspective giving a long-term view of the subject. Later, the relationship between fecundity and marriage will be established and an overview of both will be offered. The major socio-economic factors affecting fecundity and the formation of families in Spain will also be analysed. In a second paper, special attention will be given to fecundity outside marriage and the major changes in the demographic profile of unmarried mothers. Among the aspects under analysis are: the increase in the age of mothers, the increase in second and third children to unmarried mothers, the generalisation of recognition of paternity of children born to unmarried parents and the increasing role of foreign women in fecundity outside marriage. Finally, using econometrics and statistics we shall study the series of births to married and unmarried mothers with the aim of constructing a model allowing an approximation to the relationship between fecundity in and outside of marriage, developing an empirical exercise to capture the temporal and non-causal relationships between both phenomena. This will also allow the study of the development and possible long-term equilibrium of both series.