The Calendar of Human Fertility Is Changing

September 25, 2023

(The Atlantic) – No matter its exact drivers, seasonality is clearly weakening in many countries, Martinez told me; in some parts of the world, it may be entirely gone. The change isn’t uniform or entirely understood, but it’s probably to some extent a product of just how much human lifestyles have changed. In many communities that have historically planted and harvested their own food, people may have been more disinclined to, and less physically able to, conceive a child when labor demands were high or when crops were scarce—trends that are still prominent in certain countries today. People in industrial and high-income areas of the modern world, though, are more shielded from those stressors and others, in ways that may even out the annual birth schedule, Kathryn Grace, a geographer at the University of Minnesota, told me. (Read More)