Revision as of 21:32, 7 November 2009

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 sometimes 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 nulligravida 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.

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