Life-history tradeoffs in a historical population (1896-1939) undergoing rapid fertility decline: Costs of reproduction?

ABSTRACT: Evolutionary demographers often invoke tradeoffs between reproduction and survival to explain reductions in fertility during demographic transitions. The evidence for such tradeoffs in humans has been mixed, partly because tradeoffs may be masked by individual differences in quality or access to resources. Unmasking tradeoffs despite such phenotypic correlations requires sophisticated statistical analyses that account for endogeneity among variables and individual differences in access to resources. Here we tested for costs of reproduction using N=13,663 birth records from the maternity hospital in Basel, Switzerland, 1896-1939, a period characterized by rapid fertility declines. We predicted that higher parity is associated with worse maternal and offspring condition at the time of birth,

SUBMITTER: Jaeggi AV 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7612759 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature