Premarital conceptions in Romania and the subsequent behaviour: extramarital births or shotgun marriages

Mihaela Hărăguş, Babes-Bolyai University

After the fall of the socialist regime in Romania in 1989, rapid demographic changes accompanied the general socio-economic transitions. The increase of extramarital births, from 15.2% in 1992 (when first officially recorded) to a maximum of 29.4% in 2004 opened a series of discussions whether this behaviour is similar to that of western European women. This paper addresses the issues of premarital conceptions and extramarital births from the life course perspective, using data from the Generations and Gender Survey (2005). Using event history analysis I study the influence of different time constant and time-varying covariates on premarital conception risk, and using logistic regression I investigate the influence of different factors on the type of behaviour that follows a premarital conception, and which can be a shotgun marriage or an extramarital birth.