Abstract There are striking disparities in life expectancy across sociodemographic groups in the United States, shaped by structural forces such as racism, class inequality, and policy environments. To what extent do sociodemographic characteristics structure—or fail to structure—individual lifespans? Using U.S. Census data linked to administrative death records, we assess how well early‐adulthood social, economic, and demographic characteristics predict individual lifespan in a cohort of men born in 1910 and observed through their deaths between 1975 and 2005 ( N = 121,000). Despite large group‐level disparities, we find that sociodemographic characteristics measured in early adulthood explain less than two percent of the overall variation in individual lifespan. These findings reaffirm a central demographic regularity: variance in life expectancy between groups is small compared to variation in lifespan within groups. This highlights the fundamentally nondeterministic nature of how structural inequality shapes individual mortality.

Abstract Using retrospective household data collected in southwest Bangladesh, we examine whether social ties to migrants moderate the effects of extreme weather on first migrations. We consider both weak and strong forms of social ties for both domestic and international trips. We also examine differences across male and female household members. Discrete time event history models reveal that migrant social ties predict making a first trip and are stronger for international versus domestic moves. Heat waves and storms/floods are positively associated with males making domestic trips and negatively associated with domestic trips among females. However, the effects are small and not moderated by social ties. In contrast, for male international moves, the effect of heat waves is conditional on the prevalence of ties to other international migrants. In communities with a strong history of international migration, the chance of making a first trip declines as heat waves intensify. Those from communities with a lower prevalence of international migration are more likely to make a first international trip as heat waves reach 15–25 days, after which the risk of migrating declines. Together, these results suggest that migrant networks attenuate, rather than amplify, the relationship between extreme weather and international migration.

Abstract How much intra‐household inequality is there in nutritional outcomes, and what does this mean for policy targeting? Using Demographic and Health Survey data for the South Asia region, we show that two‐thirds of undernourished individuals live in households with others who are not undernourished. Within‐household inequality contributes almost as much to overall nutritional inequality as between‐household inequality. While wealth is significantly correlated with undernourishment, only half of all undernourished individuals are found in the poorest 40 percent of households. Even in the wealthiest households, 10 percent of adults and 15 percent of children are undernourished. Adding additional covariates, such as birth order, adult education, and those related to household sanitation infrastructure, does little to improve the predictive power of individual nutritional status. As a result, accurately targeting undernourished individuals using household‐ or community‐level observables is likely to be difficult. We find that straightforward outcomes such as age or access to sanitation infrastructure do as well as household wealth at targeting undernourishment; yet all the targeting methods we consider yield large inclusion and exclusion errors, raising questions as to whether nutrition interventions should be targeted.

Abstract We study changes in abortions in Spain around the first COVID‐19 lockdown. We find a large drop (of 24 percent) in the number of abortions during and shortly after the strict lockdown in spring 2020. We explore to which extent the fall was driven by fewer (unintended) pregnancies due to social isolation versus restricted access to abortion services. We show that the drop was not more pronounced in areas located further away from abortion clinics nor in locations with more COVID‐19 hospitalizations. The fall in abortions was 45 percent larger among non‐cohabiting women (relative to cohabiting women, who experienced a 16 percent decline). We also document a 38 percent drop in the abortion ratio (abortions over pregnancies), driven exclusively by non‐cohabiting women. Overall, our results suggest that the main driver of the drop in abortions in Spain was a reduction in unintended pregnancies among single women during the lockdown, due to reduced social interactions.

We evaluate the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for preterm birth in Mexico using microdata that include all births from 2014 to 2022. The country’s hybrid public/private healthcare system allows us to examine how women’s adaptive behaviors to the health crisis shaped their birth outcomes. The proportion of women giving birth in private hospitals increased dramatically after the onset of the pandemic in March 2020. This was likely a strategy to reduce their risk of infection in public hospitals, many of which were overcrowded. Time-series models suggest that preterm births increased among women who gave birth in public hospitals but decreased among women who gave birth in private settings. Difference-in-differences models based on a conception–cohort design with hospital fixed-effects indicate that the health benefits from receiving private rather than public care were concentrated among women with higher levels of education. The reduction in preterm births among more educated women was partially explained by their choice of higher quality services within the private sector and by changes in the demographic composition of patients who chose private care. Our analysis illustrates how protective behaviors subject to heterogeneous socioeconomic and structural constraints may lead to unequal health outcomes during health emergencies.

Sasser's book sits at the intersection of twin challenges facing Western and East Asian nations: climate change and fertility decline. Major climate-related events such as flooding, hurricanes, tsunamis, wildfires, and heat waves are causing premature deaths, mass displacement, and expensive reconstruction efforts. Additionally, persistent below-replacement fertility has caused worry about economic challenges as populations age and tax-paying populations decline. Pronatalist movements promoting childbearing in turn clash with environmentalist movements that see population decline as a solution to climate change. Amidst these multi-national dynamics, Sasser asks, how are young people, at the cusp of parenthood, grappling with “the kid question”? The study is primarily set in California, the largest of the United States. The state has seen several recent climate-related disasters including droughts, flooding, wildfires, and landslides. The book draws on an eclectic set of materials including: interviews with mothers who parented through climate disasters; interviews with young non-parents; literature reviews; a survey with 2521 people aged 22–35; participatory observation of a virtual event run by “Conceivable Future,” an advocacy group providing spaces to explore climate emotions and reproductive anxiety; and a description of two public campaigns—Birth Strike and #NoFutureNoChildren—which aimed to press government officials to take action. The book makes three key interventions. First, Sasser highlights how despite growing literatures on climate change and fertility decline, including those focused on climate emotions (such as fear, worry, dread, grief, anxiety, and trauma) as drivers of reproductive decision-making, people of color are “minimized, erased from the studies or vaguely framed as environmental villains” (p. 70). The erasures and minimalizations are surprising because Black, Hispanic, and Native American communities are more likely to live on land that is subject to environmental threats and climate disasters, and they have fewer resources to buffer themselves when disaster strikes. Further, government responses to extreme climate events have been shown to privilege wealthier White communities. Sasser also reminds us that “environmental villain” framing because of childbearing fits within a longer history of women of color's subjection to the harshest population control measures including forced reproduction to increase slave populations, and involuntary sterilizations under state-sponsored eugenic measures in subsequent decades. Second, Sasser illuminates how Millennials and Gen Z youth are “the reproductive anxiety generation” (p. 61). In interviews, many with youth of color, respondents see climate change as one more crisis, “layered on top of structural and systemic inequalities” (p. 94). They wonder whether it is ethical to bear children; they grapple with climate emotions and anti-childbearing peer pressure, and they contemplate adoption rather than biological parenthood for climate reasons. Third, Sasser offers three concepts to frame thinking about reproductive decision-making: “reproductive resistance” where child-desiring people publicly or quietly decide not to have children because they do not see a “livable future” (p. 12) for potential children (pp. 23, 26–7), “reproductive refusal” where people have no fertility desires and are voluntarily childfree (pp. 30–34), and “reproductive resilience” where people choose to have children despite multiple crises (pp. 34–42). Sasser argues that while typical for people of color, “reproductive resilience may be less familiar for White parents” (p. 37). The book is short, accessibly written, and clearly targeted at a mass audience. Perhaps as a result, it is thin on methodological details that population scientists might care about. For example, many non-random survey statistics are cited and given weight, and for the book's own survey, we are only told that it was “launched through a national survey organization” (p. 63). No further details on survey collection methods are given. Further, with no models presented, it is unclear exactly how much climate considerations are associated with people of color's reproductive intentions. This was a missed opportunity given the apparently rare nature of the survey. Additionally, the exact number of qualitative interviews conducted (ʻʻa couple dozen interviews … and a few people … p. 15) and the coding and analytic methods which were utilized were also unclear. Nonetheless, the book is significant in centering young people of color in the major debates of our time, and in offering a generative conceptual framework to guide future work on climate change and reproductive decision-making.