Revision as of 16:17, 13 November 2006

610

Births are classified by legitimacy ¹. Strictly speaking, a legitimate child ² may be defined as one whose father and mother were married to one another at the time of conception. But in practice, the classification depends upon the marital status of the mother at the time of the birth or, after the dissolution of marriage (510-3), at the time of conception. A legitimate birth ³ is the delivery of such a .child; other births are illegitimate births ⁴. It is general practice to consider as legitimate the children who result from pre-marital conceptions ⁵ or pre-nuptial conceptions ⁵ (i.e., conceptions occurring before marriage) provided that the parents are married to each other at the time of the birth. An illegitimate child ⁶ or child born out of wedlock ⁶ may be legitimized ⁸ or legitimated ⁸ by the subsequent marriage of its parents. The process of legitimation ⁹, which varies in different countries, may confer on the illegitimate child some or all of the legal rights of legitimate children. In some legal systems it is possible for a father to grant recognition ⁷ to, or acknowledge ⁷, his illegitimate child, i.e., to admit in legal form that he is the child’s father.

• 5. Bridal pregnancies is also used in this connection.
• 6. The legal term bastard has acquired a derogatory meaning but is occasionally used by historical demographers. According to the law of some countries a child is illegitimate if it results from adulterous relations or extra-marital relations i.e., a connection between a married woman and a man other than her husband, but such a birth is not always registered as illegitimate. .

611

Births are also classified by birth order ¹, e.g. first births, second births, etc. Birth order is usually determined by considering all previous births to the mother ³, and some times only births of the present marriage ². Birth order is generally based on live births only, but occasionally late foetal deaths are taken into account as well. A classification of women by confinement order ⁴ is made in the same way as for births by counting all pregnancies which lasted at least 28 weeks, and reckoning multiple births as one confinement (cf. 603-4). Similarly a classification by pregnancy order ⁵ is made by counting all known pregnancies. In medical parlance, a woman is called nulligra-vida ⁶ if she has never been pregnant; the terms primigravida ⁷ and multigravida ⁸ respectively are used for a woman who is pregnant for the first time or who has been pregnant before. Women are also classified by parity ⁹, usually on the basis of the number of children born alive, although in biological literature the term refers to the number of confinements, and a woman who has had no confinement at all is said to be a nullipara ¹⁰ or nulliparous ¹⁰. Similarly, a woman is termed a primipara ¹¹ and deemed to be primiparous ¹¹ at her first confinement and a multipara ¹² or multiparous ¹² at subsequent confinements.

• 1. Higher order births are births occurring after the last specified order, e.g. fifth and higher order births.
• 9. A woman who has not borne any live children is called a zero-parity woman, a one-parity woman has borne one child but no more, and so on.

612

Studies of birth timing ¹ deal with the length of birth intervals ². These include the interval between marriage and the first birth ³ and intervals between successive births ⁴. The interval between a birth and a fixed date, such as that of a census (202-1 *) or survey (203-4), is called an open birth interval ⁵; intervals that begin before and end after that date are called straddling intervals ⁶. The [[interval between marriage and the N^th birth]] ⁷ is also used to study the timing of births.

• 1. Birth spacing, although sometimes found in the sense of birth timing as above, is commonly used to refer to the deliberate efforts of couples to postpone a birth.
• 3. Also called first birth intervals. The second birth interval is that between the first and the second birth; and so on.
• 4. As seen from the vantage of that census or survey, the intervals between the recorded successive births are called closed birth intervals.

613

In computing the period of exposure to the risk of conception ¹ it is necessary to consider pregnancy intervals ². The interval between marriage and the first pregnancy is the conception delay ³ or first pregnancy interval ³. The period between the end of one pregnancy and the beginning of the next is the inter-pregnancy interval ⁴. If the time when the woman had no sexual activity is subtracted, a net inter-pregnancy interval ⁵ is obtained. The period between the end of the last pregnancy and the date of a survey is called an open inter-pregnancy interval ⁶.