Incidence of childlessness for United States women, cohorts born 1891–1945

By following Ryders technique for analyzing trends in fertility across cohorts and modifying his technique through the computation of zero parities for cohorts by individual years as well as updating his data series cohort estimates of childlessness can be obtained. This paper follows this strategy and addresses 3 questions: What changes have occurred over time across cohorts in the levels of childlessness among women who have reached age fifty? What shifts have transpired over time in cohort specific age specific levels of childlessness? What comparison can be made between measures of childlessness as reported from period data and the estimates of childlessness derived herein from cohort data? (authors)