on to start a family and have children quickly, and almost 30 percent of them were pregnant at the time they started marriage or cohabitation. Many of these children were unplanned; two-thirds of women who became pregnant before the first union formation reported that their pregnancy came too early or was not wanted (Trost 237). By contrast, less then 5 percent of women born in the late 1950s were pregnant when they entered their first union, even though more than twice as many had started a union as teenagers (almost 50 percent compared to less than 20 percent among women born twenty years earlier).The real postponement of the start of childbearing since the late 1960s manifested itself as a decrease over the groups in age-specific first-birth rates at young ages. Among women born in the early 1940s, only about one-fourth had not entered motherhood by the age of twenty-eight. The corresponding number was as much as 45 percent for women born in the early 1960s. One popular explanation for the postponement of first birth is the improved education for women. Any educational impact on the age at entry into motherhood can hardly have been direct, however, for it is highly questionable whether time spent in school at the relevant ages has been sufficiently extensive to merit any prime role in the story of childbearing in Sweden (Hoem 51). In this country, most women complete their schooling as early as at eighteen or nineteen years of age, and there has been almost no change in the educational pattern at higher ages during the last fifteen years, which is the period of first-birth postponement (Hoem 45). To the extent that there has been an effect of improved education, it must have been indirect, for example via women'’ improved chances in the labor market.In line with this, it is often argued that it has become successively more important for women to achieve a firm foothold in the labor market before first birth since most S...
