The Fertility Impact of Spousal Separation

The impact of spousal separation on marital fertility in a natural fertility context is investigated. REPMOD, a procedure for computer simulation of reproductive processes, is employed. A given length of separation affects fertility more, the less it overlaps with time during which the woman is not at risk of conception. Thus the "efficiency" of separation as a constraint on fertility increases as its duration increases, the duration of postpartum amenorrhea decreases, and fecundability decreases. Effects of spousal separation in actual situations can be estimated using results of these simulations as inputs. When contraception and induced abortion are absent, waiting times to conception become an important factor in the length of birth intervals. The length and variability of these waiting times depend on the couple's monthly chance of conception, or natural fecundability, which is governed primarily by the couple's marital intercourse rate.1 The relevance of spousal separation to the marital intercourse rate is obvious. Indeed, in two classic studies, extensive spousal separation has been shown to be a principal cause of relatively low age-specific natural fecundability.2 A framework often used for the comparative study of total fertility rates (i.e., children ever born to women surviving until the end of the reproductive period) has been the proximate fertility determinant scheme of Bongaarts.3 In this scheme, the total fertility rate is treated as the total fecundity rate (conventionally, 15.3 births) times the product of four coefficients, each varying from