Child Protection and Adult Outcomes: Evaluating the Reproductive Behavior following Evacuation to Foster Care during World War II

Torsten Santavirta, Stockholm University

Parental separation during childhood may influence reproductive behavior during adulthood. The authors evaluate the associations between unaccompanied evacuation to foster care and reproductive behavior using nationally representative data on participants of the Finnish policy of evacuation during WWII including sibling pairs discordant in evacuation status. This study combines Finnish individual level data collected from war time government records with Finnish census data from 1950 and 1971, and population register from 1971-2011 for Finnish cohorts born in 1933-1944 to examine associations between evacuation to temporary foster care in Sweden during World War II and reproductive behavior. Marriage patterns between ages 38 and 52 are also looked at. Selection of evacuee families is accounted for by comparing evacuees with their same-sex siblings. No statistically significant associations between evacuation and reproductive and marriage traits are found in the within sibling comparison although some associations are found in naïve least squares comparisons (OLS).