Law And Fertility In Europe

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Health Law addresses some of the most critical issues facing scholars, legislators, and judges today: how to protect against threats to public health that can quickly cross national borders, how to ensure access to affordable health care, and how to regulate the pharmaceutical industry, among many others. When matters of life and death literally hang in the balance, it is especially important for policymakers to get things right, and the making of policy can be greatly enhanced by learning from the successes and failures of approaches taken in other countries. Where there are "common challenges" in law and health, there is much to be gained from experiences elsewhere. Thus, for example, countries that suffered early from the COVID-19 pandemic provided valuable lessons about public health interventions for countries that were hit later. Accordingly, the Handbook considers key health law questions from a comparative perspective. In health law, common challenges are frequent. In addition to ones already mentioned, there are questions about addressing the social determinants of health (e.g., poverty and pollution), organizing health systems to optimize use of available resources, ensuring that physicians provide care of the highest quality, protecting patient privacy in a data-driven world, and properly balancing patient autonomy with the interest in preserving life when reproductive and end-of-life decisions are made. This Handbook's wide scope and comparative take on health law are particularly timely. Economic globalization has made it increasingly important for different countries to harmonize their legal rules. Students, practitioners, scholars, and policymakers need to understand how health laws vary across national boundaries and how reforms can ensure a convergence toward an optimal set of legal rules, or ensure that specific legal arrangements are needed in particular contexts. Indeed, comparative analysis has become essential for legal scholars, and The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Health Law is the only resource that provides such an analysis in health law.

This monograph brings together a number of important papers dealing with the medical, societal and demographic ramifications of fertility and is a very valuable contribution to the European debate on fertility. The very low fertility levels in several EU Member States are a matter of public concern. An increase in fertility will not by itself stop demographic ageing but can contribute to decelerating current demographic trends. It is therefore essential to understand better the reasons behind Europe's low fertility rates. The difficulty of reconciling private life with a professional career far too often compel women to postpone having a family or to have fewer children than they would desire. It follows that more and more couples reach an age where fertility problems become prevalent. Involuntary infertility is a serious medical condition with strong negative consequences on the wellbeing of the couples concerned and has a negative impact on demographic trends.

Recent statistics suggest that fertility in Europe shows signs of recovery after decades of year-on-year drops. This report updates a study on low fertility from 2004 and explores the extent, causes and consequences of the recent recovery.

This volume summarizes the major findings of the Princeton European Fertility Project. The Project, begun in 1963, was a response to the realization that one of the great social revolutions of the last century, the remarkable decline in marital fertility in Europe, was still poorly understood. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This study sets out to investigate the relationship between low fertility and new patterns in the family and non-family sectors. It examines the social implications of childlessness, single-child families and other family sizes with an emphasis on questions of social cohesion. Firstly a theoretical perspective on childlessness is given. This is followed by an analysis of the impact of changes in birth order-specific fertility on family size using the results from a simulation study which analyses how family sizes change when the level and timing of age- and birth order-specific fertility change. The final section discusses possible consequences for social cohesion and social exclusion of the trends identified in the previous sections with a focus on poverty [Ed.]