Direct and indirect effects of exposure in infancy to whooping cough on female fertility in 19th and 20th century Southern Sweden

A growing body of literature has shown that early life conditions have strong implications for later life health and wellbeing. There are not many existing works, however, that analyse whether exposure to disease in infancy affects reproductive health. Using data from Southern Sweden for women born between 1813 and 1898 this work intends to cover some of these gaps. Previous research that used the same data showed that individuals exposed to whooping cough in infancy had greater risks of dying from early adulthood and until old age. An impact was also observed on the reproductive health of low SES women, who experienced lower proportions of male births, possibly due to a higher incidence of miscarriages, as well as higher offspring infant mortality. Using dynamic path analysis, the current work analyses whether exposure to whooping cough in infancy affects female fertility directly and/or indirectly. Besides possibly having direct impacts on fecundity, the effect that early life conditions have on the survival of the preceding child could, in fact, have physiological and behavioural implications on the hazard of experiencing a successive birth and on its timing. SES will also be considered as a further intermediate variable.