Vol. 24, No. 2, 2007 Journal of Population Research  WHICH WOMEN STOP AT ONE CHILD IN AUSTRALIA? Nick Parr, † Macquarie University The decline in fertility in Australia in the 1990s relected both decreased irst- order birth rates and decreased second-order birth rates (Kippen 2004). Whilst childlessness has been studied extensively, little attention has been paid to the progression from one to two children. This study analyses which women stop at one child using data from 1,809 parous 40–54 year olds from Wave 1 of the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. Impor- tant early lifecourse predictors of whether a woman stops her childbearing at one child are shown to be a woman’s country of birth, highest level and type of schooling, and her father’s occupation. A woman’s marital status and her age at the time of the irst birth are also shown to be signiicant predictors of her likelihood of not progressing to a second birth. The causes of trends over time are discussed. Keywords: Fertility, cohort fertility, parity progression, births, one child, family formation, Australia, low fertility, Second Demographic Transition, migrants Despite the recent small increase in the total fertility rate (from 1.73 in 2001 to 1.81 in 2005), the current low level of fertility remains a prominent issue in Australia’s public debate (ABS 2006a). Kippen (2004) has shown that the reduction in fertility in Australia between 1991 and 2000 was due largely to the reduction and the delay of irst and second births, there having been little change in fertility rates for women with parity two or higher over this period. The percentage of women who by their 50 th birthday had a completed family size of one increased from eight per cent to 11 per cent between 1991 and 2001 and is projected to rise to around 15 per cent in 2021, almost double the igure for 1991 (Kippen 2006). Whilst the demographic character- istics of the childless in Australia have been studied extensively (Merlo and Rowland 2000; Weston and Qu 2001; Parr 2005), it appears that little attention has been paid to women who cease childbearing after the irst child. In some countries other than Australia, one-child families have become widespread. One example is China, which pursues a one-child policy, but other countries where a one-child pattern predomi- nates include Austria, Bulgaria, Italy, Romania, Spain, and the European countries formed from the former Soviet Union (Avdeev 2001; McDonald 2002; Greenhalgh 2003; Sobotka 2003). However, despite the increase in its prevalence during the 1990s, in contemporary Australia the one-child family is still something of a rarity; the two- child family remains the norm (McDonald 1998; Kippen 2006). † Address for correspondence: Senior Lecturer in Demography, Department of Business, Division of Economic and Financial Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109 Australia. E-mail: Nick.Parr@mq.edu.au.