English second edition 2013

611

Chapter 6 • Fertility

Births are also classified by birth order1, e.g. first births, second births, etc. Birth order is usually determined by considering all previous births to the mother3, and sometimes only births of the present marriage2. 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 order4 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 order5 is made by counting all known pregnancies. In medical parlance, a woman is called nulligravida6 if she has never been pregnant; the terms primigravida7 and multigravida8 respectively are used for a woman who is pregnant for the first time or who has been pregnant before. Women are also classified by parity9, 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 nullipara10 or nulliparous10. Similarly, a woman is termed a primipara11 and deemed to be primiparous11 at her first confinement and a multipara12 or multiparous12 at subsequent confinements.

Footnotes

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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