Fertility in Israel: Stall or Transition?

Anaïs Simard-Gendron, Université de Montréal

This article aims to review the way the demographic transition and, more recently, the second demographic transition in Israel have been discussed in the literature. A number of aspects related to the SDT have been brought up in the past years such as late age at marriage and at first birth, pre-marital cohabitation, and births to never-married women. These phenomena still being marginal in the population, we argue that rather than initiating the SDT, fertility in Israel is stalling at a level well above the replacement level. We then proceed to analyze the factors that are at the root of such a stall. While changes in the reproductive behaviors are starting to emerge and women gain more access to education and the labor market, the access to reproductive health programs that promote large family have a positive impact on fertility that counter-balance the other factors that tend to decrease fertility.