Women’s Reproductive Health Conditions and Fertility Goals

There is a large body of research examining women’s fertility decision-making. Yet this work rarely considers how women’s experiences with reproductive health conditions may be linked to their fertility goals, a problematic oversight given the growing emphases on reproductive careers and childbearing biographies that highlight the need to take a life course approach to fertility. Using the 2015–2019 National Survey of Family Growth ( N = 8867), this paper examines how reproductive health conditions are associated with women’s fertility goals among women who are not surgically sterile or meet the medical definition of infertility. Slightly more than one in five women report at least one reproductive health condition. Multivariable logistic regressions show that women who report a diagnosis of any reproductive health condition are 34% more likely to desire a child than their peers with no such diagnoses. However, conditional on desiring a child, women with such diagnoses are 35% less likely to intend to have a child. These findings suggest that reproductive health conditions might be perceived as barriers to fulfilling fertility goals.