Early life environments and first-time parenthood: The experience of native women in Sweden, 1990-2009

It has been shown that detrimental birth contexts, for instance famines, can exert long-lasting effects over female fertility outcomes. Such events, however, are rare, too extreme with respect to the strength of exposure, and therefore offer few policy implications. Moreover, they instrument just one feature of birth environments – nutritional shortage. The role of non-acute characteristics of birth contexts which encompass more than just the effects of under-nutrition for entry into motherhood is still unknown. This study relates first-time fertility with non-extreme, exogenously-determined contextual characteristics of female birth environments captured by regional-level infant mortality in Sweden in 1970-1976. Doing so allows us to asses not just the nutritional effects, but rather the totality of early health environments, taking pollution, standard of living, and infectious disease burden also into account. Our preliminary results indicate that even mildly severe birth contexts are associated with a reduced hazard of transitioning into motherhood.