Parity links to later-life disease burden in women
Black women had three times the odds of latent infecundity, and both infecundity probability and high parity tracked with more later-life medical conditions.
The Journals of Gerontology, Series B
Researchers analyzed ever-married, non-Hispanic Black and White women born between 1920 and 1941 from the historical Health and Retirement Study and AHEAD cohorts. They evaluated how completed parity and childlessness related to later-life medical conditions and self-rated health, adjusting for early-life factors including exposure to Jim Crow-era structural racial inequalities. Using zero-inflated count regression, the authors identified a latent "always-zero" group to calculate a predicted infecundity probability.
Black women had three times the odds of latent infecundity group membership and an 11% higher expected parity if fecund compared to White women. Both predicted infecundity and high parity were positively associated with the total number of medical conditions, reflecting a U-shaped pattern across birth counts. Net of parity, younger Black women had a higher-than-expected number of medical conditions relative to all women.
Why it matters
The findings suggest that reproductive history and early-life structural inequalities influence the lifelong accumulation of chronic disease in women.
Caveats
The investigation relies on observational data from a specific historical cohort of ever-married women, which restricts causal conclusions and may reflect historical exposures unique to those birth cohorts.
The paper
Race/ethnicity, completed parity, and women's later-life health in the Health and Retirement Study
Duke University
The Journals of Gerontology, Series B · 1 Oct 2026